I am a guy who loves to tinker, loves to make things work. I have over 20+ years of experience in designing, building and ripping around in go karts.
I like making Go Karts out of junk. A true home made go kart to me, is one that costs you less than $100 to $200.
If you can scrounge around E-Bay or even a tool supply house:
You can make a decent, safe, strong,
Absolutely Cool Homemade Go Kart!
Read on about my story, and some of the go karts I have built!
Go Karts can be the funnest project that you will ever do! How many times have kids drooled over my go-carts! Well now for the first time, I am releasing the plans of the go-carts I developed over the years.
I started out with an old lawnmower, that my grandpa was throwing away and tried making a gocart. To my dads amazement I had a wooden go-cart, with wooden wheels running down the street. What a day that was! It was simple, crude, but fun!
Later I had some luck and found a go-cart that my friend had stored outside for a couple of years. I bought it off of his hands for $45 and had it running that night. Granted the throttle was run off of fishing wire, but hey it was working!
I grew tired of having to fix go karts all the time, and wanted to make one that never broke. I sat down and designed a go-cart and went crazy evaluating how it would perform, what the weight distribution was, how I could optimize it. And if that was not enough I supercharged the go-cart to make things wild. Yeah, those were the days: just good ole fun!
I went off to engineering school (MSOE) and then things got fancy. I evaluated the frame on a Finite Element Analysis Program (FEA) and determined what I already knew, that the frame was strong!I then built the go-cart using some tube I had scrounged from some old railing, found some old go-cart parts for $10, got an engine for free and then welded up a frame in under week. I had the go-cart running after two weeks. For under $100 I made what we called the RED go-cart.
On a hot summer day, while I was now away with my new wife, the two go karts I worked on got sold during a garage cleaning session. Something about $10 for a go kart! What a lucky junk man that was. I begged to buy it back, but the excuse was “My kid loves this go kart, I can’t sell it out from under him!”
Well, lucky me, I was smart enough to keep my original plans. I kept them on computer and had my old template that I had made out of grocery bags. I still have it in the basement, weld burn marks and all!
I built another go-cart, and have had it running for the past 9 years. It is absolute fun. It still gets my heart pumping when I jump on it!
One of my college buddies came over and said:“Boy that thing drives like it is on rails!”
Oh, and if you didn’t notice, I had to keep the supercharger idea going too!
I had a mild spurt where I was selling superchargers for Briggs engines, or any other engine if you wanted. I am in the process of designing a better supercharger for go-cart engines, but that is not available yet. The superchargers manual, however, is available!
This Web Site’s Offerings
My passion if you couldn’t tell so far is go-carts! I still remember as a kid, drooling over a belt driven go-cart that I saw. I was determined to build my own. I was going to do whatever it would take to build a go-cart!
It was pathetic when I started out. My not having a working knowledge of strength of materials made for design nightmares. Things were just not panning out. I was under sizing things and expecting them to hold up!
This is where working with your Dad is a good idea if you are under 18 years of age. Dads have good horse sense and know how to get things done right. So I suggest that you make it a project with your Dad, and not waste a lot of time trying things that are not really going to work. After all, the object here is to have some fun, and soon!
I have put together design tools for building go-carts. There are other websites that give you information, but it is difficult to find and cumbersome to work with. I think you will like this website.
First of all, you can design your own go-cart using the tools I give you. There are some critical design parameters that go-carting involves, like weight distribution, etc.
Secondly, I am providing to you these tools so that you can work through the design process and come up with a gocart of your own.
The basic layout of the website is:
| The Concept Stage The concept stage is to feel out your budget. What do you want to want to spend on this gocart? Do you want to go hog wild and build something super fancy or do you want good bang for your buck? |
| The Plans Stage The plans can be developed by yourself, or you can get them somewhere else. Developing a plan can be quite involved, but we have the tools to get the job done. If you are a prospective engineering student this would be good process to go through. |
| Tools Section The Tools section is designed to help you quantify the design process and get something on paper, and then start building it. The basic calculators are horsepower and performance, weight distribution and Bills of Materials listing. In the engineering kit, the programs are more expansive giving you more variables to play with, which is desirable when trying to optimize performance. |
We are also available to answer
any questions you may have.
Simply submit our contact form
Thanks for visiting our website, and if you need any thing, just holler!
Regards –
Robert Gamble (aka: Gamblighini)
Gamble Industries LLC
