The tension mounts

So with the length of the chain that i will be using I expect some stretch. The engine kit came with a chain tensioner but its an ugly bulky one. It also has the possibility to twist into the back wheel when mounted effecting in a sudden unannounce stop. I did not like it, so I decided to make another one. I wanted something that could handle a fair amount of up and down and a little bit of side to side tension as well. I also did not want to do a whole lot of cutting and grinding, fabricating something from scratch. so i started looking around to see what is available that would only require slight modification.

When they bought a bunch of new equipment at work some of it came with a little open ended wrench, for installation, that had 10mm and 8mm heads. There are hundreds of these little wrenches lying around at work. Yesterday one of those went missing...

This wrench had the perfect length for the area where the tensioner will be fitted. I welded the two open ends shut and filed and ground them flat. Drilled holes and mounted an old skateboard wheel to the one end.

 The other end will be fastened to a tab that will be welded to the frame. I made this tab using a little piece of tubing an a piece of flat bar. I welded these together, attached two nuts to the top of the resulting circle that can take a pinch bolt. An old skateboard bearing goes into this little clip to act as a swivel for the tensioner.

I can however only mount the whole assembly once I have the chain in place so that i can find a good spot for it. I might have to add another tensioner somewhere closer to the engine but we will have to see later.

This tensioner will auto tension with a spring creating a little less maintenance than the one from the kit that requires manual adjustment.

The next step to getting the chain mounted is fitting the sprocket to the back wheel. It also is an ugly sprocket and needed a little bit of, well sanctification.

So I made it holey so to speak. Looks a lot better...

and here it is painted. i'm enjoying all of this far too much...