The Garage 54 team loves to answer dumb car questions with absolutely outlandish mad scientist automotive experiments. But they haven’t really touched motorcycles. That changed as the team finally came up with a wacky thing to do with a motorcycle. They turned a Ural into a five-wheeled ATV.
The Ural is already an awesomely capable machine. These motorcycles are designed for places in Russia where the roads are in poor shape or simply don’t exist. You can even get them in two-wheel drive. Garage 54's build tries to expand on that ruggedness while adding additional stability.
In true Garage 54 fashion, the build is about as complicated as you’d expect. After removing the sidecar and rear wheel, they figured the live axle they planned for wasn’t going to work for max articulation. Plus, with only three wheels, riding it could get sketchy when a wheel lifts.
Instead, they bought a transaxle from a front-wheel-drive Moskvitch. With this setup, the first set of rear wheels will be powered by the driveshafts.
The team thought about welding the differential inside the transaxle as this would have the effect of making the two drive wheels locked in rotation. However, they decided to leave it open so the front wheel will be more effective at steering the rig. With a welded differential, the inner and outer wheels are unable to move at different speeds in turns as they normally would.
As for the trailing wheels? Garage 54 modified axle and differential components from a Lada Samara. The whole rear end is bolted up to the subframe of a Samara. Check out the pretty impressive articulation they got out of the trailing wheels!
I won’t spoil how the build worked out on the test ride, so check out the video for what happens! Garage 54 has even crazier plans for the motorcycle so it’s not the last we’ll see of it.