Originally Posted by
dabac
I'm not sure I follow you...
You live up a hill.
You have a trike.
You want to ride down in the valley.
You're thinking about adding a gas engine to your trike, to help with the climb back up to where you live.
Correct?
Thing with combustion engines is that they don't scale down that well WRT fuel consumption, noise and emissions.
An engine small enough to only add a little power is hopelessly inefficient. And an engine big enough to be a decent engine is really too powerful to work well with an otherwise stock bicycle. By the time you have a bicycle that's beefy enough to do well with a sensibly sized motor, well, then you have a fairly sucky moped...
If your trike has a single front wheel, consider getting a front wheel with an electric motor in it.
after doing some more reading I decided a gas engine is impractical for my application, I'm looking toward gathering info on electric, i need torque not long distance or speed, if i was to install an electric wheel it would most likely only see use to get me up the hill to home... yes my trike is a delta(single front wheel, currently20" i plan to change the fork and switch to 26" to match the rear)but I have reservations about front wheel drive, it seems to me that with the extreme load my heavy trike along with my fat ass(almost 1/4 ton total) provide that an electric front wheel would lack traction, i'm thinking all the weight would be rearward with that front wheel scrubbing off tread daily. i may be way off base but it seems to me i need to get power on a rear wheel, then i get to thinking "if i have power on one rear wheel and my feeble pedaling on the other(yepp it currently only drives thru the right rear wheel) will i be fighting to hold a straight line"?