Imperial Rocker Clutch Finally Done

Ok, figuring out just how to go about making a somewhat complex clutch set-up like this one work required a lot of listening to the Some Girls album, gluewine, anxiety attacks, stale coffee and social isolation. It also required a lot of fabrication of parts not availabe in the V-Twin catalogue.

Wearing Love Cycles t-shirts helps the weld's penetration.

The thing that makes this set-up somewhat complex is
1: I wanted to hide the clutch pedal spring inside the primary
2: The rocker pedal wants to move the transmission’s clutch arm in the wrong direction.

So, coming up with a clean way to reverse it wasn’t too complicated really, I figured you could always use clutch cable, yeah that would be really easy but not very clean. Then you could use some kind of gears to reverse it, like 2 different cam gears or such, now that would be a bit more tricky but definitely doable. Then you could do it the extremely time consuming way I did, with an internal linkage that bolts up to the primary cover’s inside.

After I've done the bushing and pressed it in I like to cut the whole part one more time for a 100% flat and shiny surface, I do this as a distraction. So if you get everything else all crooked and warped you can always point out the shiny surface to impress your bros, yeah I like that.

Here's the scary part, I hate setting up big stuff like this in the milling machine, but the primary cover gave a very impressive and somber resonance.

Staying sober long enough to hide the spring and making the geometry work inside the little area in between the clutch basket, engine sprocket and chain was the tricky part. I had to do the spring linkage lever that bolts up to the pedal’s axle really short because of chain clearance, and that required a new ratio at the front lever to compensate, or it would move the transmission's clutch arm way to short.

I mentioned that I hate math on here before but there was no way around it this time, so after a lot of calculating I did the front lever 5.1:1 which made up for over 2.5” clutch arm movement, and that’s more than enough. Now this linkage has more than enough clearance to run either a belt or chain drive, if you run a chain drive however you can't go any smaller than a 22 tooth engine sprocket (this bike will run a 25 tooth engine sprocket)

Peek-a-boo, I see you.

This is what it looks like mounted, and after staring at it for 24 hours I'm pretty sure I'll run the original 1947 rocker pedal on it, but with a few minor adjustements done to it.



Finally, here's a little clip of how this set-up works. Now all I need is to pray for never getting another time consuming idea like this ever again.