My trike is only four years old but one of the main reasons I stopped using it is because it is plagued by mechanical problems that I simply didn't have time to sort out in amongst all the work for my degree. This meant I no longer 'trusted' it to take me on long rides without getting stranded and I always seemed to have grease on my hands at the end of most rides for some reason or another.

Customer Service

As of 2006 AVD have appointed a new member of staff to look after customer services, whose name I've forgotten, but who is very good: they now answer the phone and I actually ordered a part and received it a few days later, neatly packed with a handwritten note thanking me for my custom. Bob Dixon is also back in action and as far as I can tell everything at AVD is back to normal.

For a period between 2003 and 2006 AVD seemed to have virtually gone out of business - they didn't answer the phone or reply to e-mails some me or anyone else on the bentrideronline forums. Nobody seems to really know what is going on and no news has been posted on the website, rumour is that Bob Dixon suffered some sort of illness or accident and that his brother temporarily took over the running (maybe hobbling would be a better verb) of the company. Much of the trike is custom parts that are awkward to make oneself without a well equipped machine shop.

The Windcheetah suffers from various design flaws, Mike Burrows did a lot of it right but AVD who actually make it definitely do some things wrong. It later turns out by talking to dealers/users that these types of problems are common despite Bob Dixon claiming otherwise.

Fasteners

None of the fasteners are treated with with either threadlock or anti-seize compound. This means that either fasteners will mysteriously loosen themselves at inappropriate moments, or when something breaks you will find that the stainless fasteners that it hold it on have electrochemically welded to the aluminium and have to be drilled out. Needless to say both of these are a major PITA. If you own or buy a Windcheetah I recommend that you take the whole thing to bits and treat every fastener with something like Loctite 'Blue' Stick or #242 threadlock on things that should stay put : it has controlled strength and is removable with hand tools but it stops the screw seizing up or loosening unexpectedly. For very small fasteners use clear silicone sealant instead or they can be difficult to remove. I would particularly recommend this for the screws that hold the mudguards together as these are exposed to water, grit and salt and all of mine corroded solid.

Composites + Screws

One of the other big problems is on parts where anything made of composite plastic it attached to anything metal. The people at AVD don't seem to realise the need to spread the load over a large area and to use rubber mountings or similar to avoid the composite gradually disintegrating where the two part meet. What happens is if a small area is under too much stress the fibres will delaminate and the damage will slowly spread. This mainly applies to the point where the tailbox attaches to the trike - the hole where the support road at the back of the trike attaches to the bottom of the fairing disintegrated.

Bob strenuously denies this has happened before. From what I have seen I find this hard to believe especially since the actual quality of the laminate is poor and it is evidently not vacuum bagged but is simply a wet lay-up. This does not apply to structural frame tubes which are professionally pulltruded.

Fortunately I pre-emptively re-engineered the rest of the mountings for the fairing as seen in the photogallery above and fixed up a new system that spread the load and avoided the already damaged area.

It also applies to the mudguards, unfortunately I didn't realise this until too late. What happens is that the corners of the aluminium blocks that the mudguards attach to gradually dig into the composite and it falls to bits. It took me about 10 hours work to make good the damaged laminate and then to machine up some special threaded washers that were glued permanently to the composite. In order to do this I had to disassemble the front of the trike because all the fasteners were jammed solid and had to be drilled out and the threads cleaned up again as discussed above. This probably took another few hours.

The bottom of the seat looks a bit iffy where it meets the bolts but the laminate is much thicker so it is less of a problem and it rests on rubber grommets on the bottom at least.

Chain Management

The return chain guides are lousy, either the chain catches on the metal pin that is supposed to stop the chain jumping out of the guide pulley pulling the whole assembly round and locking the chain solid, or the bolt comes undone unexpectedly and sends bits of the chain management system bouncing down the road, or the chain flaps around as you are going over bumps while coasting and comes off the front chainring or it behaves itself and just makes an irritating noise. I will eventually get around to replacing the whole jolly lot with a nice chain tube which will solve all these problems at a stroke and keep the chain cleaner.