I was just thinking and it's pretty simple in theory so I'm looking at building a two seater 100cc with a harbor freight motor. Anyone done this? Got tips, pics, build threads for me to check etc?
I was just thinking and it's pretty simple in theory so I'm looking at building a two seater 100cc with a harbor freight motor. Anyone done this? Got tips, pics, build threads for me to check etc?
Yes, yes I have...
Tips are, go light, and if you're using suspension, cannibalize something from a light 4-wheeler and incorporate that. We had a 10hp Briggs & Stratton engine with a CVT, so you might be looking to build something a little smaller to keep it quick.
What about with a 1-liter bike engine?
Typically many Formula SAE teams give their partner Baja SAE (pic above) teams for being easier, less rigorous blah blah, but one year there was a school's Baja team who decided to build a car that was eligible for both events, just change the shocks/springs, wheels/tires, and engine and a couple other easy things. They ended up beating their school's official FSAE team.
But anyway it would be awesome to combine the suspension and capability of one of the Baja cars with a sweet drivetrain. If I were to do it, I would make a chassis that was a big longer and not as tall, I think the short tall things are ugly.
Yeah, I hear a lot of the FSAE teams talking trash about the Baja teams. We were all members of both teams at our school, and we still trash talked each other! 
We built our Baja on a budget of about $2.5k, and had we known anything about the needs of amphibious travel, we would have dominated the endurance race. Our top speed was 2-3mph higher than the next fastest team, ground clearance higher, and handling nimbler than most, but we were second slowest in water speed (only behind the Naval Academy team o_0) so we spent most of our time relaxing while slowly floating across a flooded quarry every lap.
In reply to sobe_death:
wtf was a flooded quarry doing as part of mini baja......Nearly everyone was running geared transmissions when I helped build USI's baja, we had a cvt from a gator. It broke alot. 
In reply to yamaha:
In the Baja East division, you are required to build an amphibious vehicle. We were here, racing on the MX courses and trails through the woods. It was an old Kaolin quarry, so as you can imagine most teams had trouble in the super-slick mud. Not ol' Grandmas Biscuits up there
We had a CVT that was specifically built for Mini Baja duty, plus a random gear reduction box we found in a closet that just so happened to work brilliantly for our needs.
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