hi folks,
A guy has a sidecar in my area for sale and I'm trying to work out what it is. Can anyone help me?
Very early California companion. These sidecars have a bunch of known issues. First the torsion bar suspension is known to have the 5 flat bar springs crack and fail. Latter sidecars had a welding rod welded over the square hole that these slide into so that they would not come out should they break. The bronze bushing that the suspension pivots on is a high wear item. Both of these issues are not all that hard to deal with. The wheel is also known to fail, the bases of the spokes on both ends are known to crack. I have not seen this when ran on lighter bikes, the only ones I have seen fail were on larger touring type bikes but you will want to keep an eye on this. This is a problem that is not so easy to fix as I know of no wheel that is narrow enough to fit under the fender and work with the one inch (some times 1 1/8 inch) axle. The mounts on this sidecar are the old ball socket type which are known to fail. These will need to be up graded to hiem joints. We have the parts in stock to do this. We also offer proper bike specific NOT universal mounts.
Excellent info - thanks JayDMC!
I'll go have a look at it and check out the problem areas. I'm working on an old Ural hack to fit to my Ariel SQ4, but this one looks much nicer (and lighter). The SQ4 is around 450 pounds wet and has a claimed 40BHP. WOuld this be a good match? Also, what is a reasonable price for this assuming the wheel is good?
We ran one of these sidecars on my wife's Eldorado. I put 140 LBS of ballast under the sidecar. How much ballast you may or may not need depends on how heavy you are and how wide the sidecar is mounted. I can not help you with any bike specific mounts for the SQ4 (I do for some reason have a service manual for the bike and can use it to help figure some of this out for you) we can help you with the up graded lower mounts you will need called bosses as the ball socket these used will fail.
A lot to do with pricing is location and demand. $500-$1500 is what I would expect this to sell for again depending on location which a lot of this has to do with population density in the area it is being sold.
Jay G
DMC sidecars
www.dmcsidecars.com
866-638-1793
