My initial impressions of the Windcheetah were gained on the Eastway cycle track. Having foregone the opportunity to ride it in London traffic, my first ride on the road started with a long hill in Rugby. When I stood up after this fast and exciting ride, I promptly fell over. Lesson number one was that recumbent tricycles are hard on untrained knees. (Maybe those guys at Ryde spent so much time sitting around in their Windcheetahs because they couldn't stand up.) Over the week that I had the machine I put many more miles on it, as did some of my students, who have between them built tricycles, pedal powered hydrofoils, one wheel motorcycles, and whose comments were very useful. We also measured and analysed it, but it must be remembered that our machine was number 007, a Mk 3 machine now superseded by the Mk3A. Where known, differences in the construction details are indicated.

Construction

Looking at the machine in detail, it has a cruciform chassis with a 50mm main tube and 40mm transverse tubes connecting the main joint to the kingpin mountings. It is constructed from aluminium tube bonded with epoxy adhesive into cast aluminium joints. This is a technique requiring careful control of conditions but has been used in the aircraft industry for many years. Various plates and bosses are welded or bolted to the chassis to carry seat mountings etc. The cruciform has an elegant simplicity about it and feels substantial enough for the job, although its elegance was marred on our sample by the paint job which looked to me like pitch with aluminium flakes in it and was probably called Tunisian Midnight on the tin. Future production will use Loctite bonding instead of epoxy for the chassis joints, as Burrows Engineering's numerically controlled machine tools can produce the accuracy of fit required.