anyone have a small homebuilt? 55" or narrower?

i'm in the planning stages of a geo metro powered buggy buggy but i want it as small or smaller than my brother in laws roketa 250 because he has problems fitting it down some of our trails.

Wow dude you'll kill your self. My 180r is 50in and its not so stable the way I ride Dont think 2 1/2 on each side would make it worthy of any thing bigger than 250. Well with some mods... I'll get back to you.

Your power plant and rear wheels will be wider than 55". For stability you want a wider track up front. I don't see how you can make a safe vehicle with those dimension restrictions.

high speed stability is not really a concern on this project, it will only be used on tight trails through the woods and maybe a little creek riding if it proves to be capable there. probably would never get it over 25 mph. i've ridden yard carts at 50 mph that were only about 36" wide, so surely i could handle a 55" wide buggy at 25....

i found this buggy online somewhere. it is using a metro 3 cylinder engine/trans and stock metro axles. he made his own rotors, but the hub-hub measurement is still the same as a stock metro. track width on a metro is 54.5" and his wheels might have widened it 4 inches on each side. that would put it out to roughly 62". looks to me like the axles could be shortened and the width brought down considerably, so if you cut 4" out of each side, it would be back down to roughly 55". suspension travel is not super important, so long axles are not really needed. if i get 5" of travel it will be plenty

ok, so he's at 67", i had him send me some detailed pictures and he measured it and took a pic of that for me.

but it also looks like i could lop a good 5 inches out of each axleshaft, so that would get it down to roughly 57". he is also running solid axle atv wheels on the back, so if i ran IRS atv wheels, it would pull them in some.....

55" could be done fairly easily i think

well, i just went out and measured my brother in laws roketa and i guess he messed up when i had him measure it for me the other day. it's 59" wide.

so as long as i stayed under 60" i would be ok on our trails, it would just take some careful tire placement.

Now thats the size I'm looking for. That guy's rear a-arms is a death trap It would take every bit of that extra space in his rear now just to make it safe.I got a bad I can't spell 150 that would do what you want so why the big motor for only 25mph?

Sounds like designing a ride to a trail called instability. Why not simply use a 250cc motor, do all the good mods, and gear it for ~25 mph?

That would take the fun out of. I find that I have more fun building and wrenching as I do driving.

How are you going to gear down the Geo for trail riding? The stock gearing is not tight trail friendly and you will burn up the clutch.