Longstaff Tricycle

Below are some pictures of a George Longstaff touring tricycle, which we have recently been refurbishing. If you are looking for the Longstaff website, this is it.

Ruby is a Longstaff 2 wheel drive lightweight touring tricycle. It belongs to Colin Guthrie, one of our founding directors, now retired. This trike has been back to Longstaff for upgrading and a respray, but Colin would trust no-one else with the final preparation of this machine.

This trike is 16 years old. Colin started using trikes to transport his children about, using a somewhat bodged homemade machine. Before too long, he came into contact with Peter Duncan, the tricycle sage of Paisley. Peter sold him a lightweight racing trike with a Ken Rodgers axle. Colin liked this trike, and still has it, but heard of something better: the Longstaff 2 wheel drive.

The axle is of great importance to a trike. The Ken Rodgers axles are copies of the pre-war Higgins type. These are the stuff of nightmares. Many bike mechanics who have had the misfortune to work on one take months to recover and run away screaming every time they see a trike.

The Longstaff axle is different. That's it in the picture above. The late George Longstaff was a proper engineer. The story is that he had lots of ideas to make better trike axles, but Ken Rodgers wasn't interested, so he set up on his own.

In trikes, like cars, the two rear wheels turn at different rates. If the axle were solid then the handling would be dreadful and the tyres would wear rapidly. The simplest solution to this problem is to only drive one wheel, usually the left in the UK. This works quite well, and is the solution used by Pashley and most other mass market trikes.

Two wheel drive is better, particularly on ice. In a car and some trikes this is done by a differential. The disadvantage of this is that drive will go to the fastest wheel, which has least traction. In a double freewheel system, drive will go to the slowest wheel, which will be the one that has most traction. This trike was made with an axle that accepted Sachs freewheel sprockets, which was a great idea at the time. Now these sprockets are no longer made, and seldom found as old stock, the only way to keep the trike on the road is to send it back and have a new axle fitted which takes modern Shimano type freehub sprockets, which is what was done.

The Longstaff axle is so beautifully made that it's the kind of thing you take apart and reassemble for the fun of it.

Above is an attempt at an arty photo.

This trike used to be green, with a custom made metal box on the back for Colin to put his doctor's bag in whilst doing his rounds. Unfortunately this box was far too heavy and inflexible, and broke the back of the trike. It was returned to the makers for repair, respray in black, and a motorcycle plastic box fitted.

In this configuration Colin used it regularly until his retirement in 2008. During this time he broke the only two Longstaff half shafts ever to have failed. It is to the credit of Longstaff that even though he designed the axles to be very strong and never expected them to break, he designed them in such a way that the wheel stayed on even with a failure, unlike the Higgins type where the wheel rolls off down the road when the axle breaks.

Colin likes his comfort, so we fitted gel pads under the handlebar tape.