My first little steps ...

I'm a complete newbie at this stuff. I haven't handled anything other than bicycles previously and even then, that's only been at the basic level of fixing flat tires. I'm doing this project to learn stuff and I'm aware that there's still many many jobs that I have never done before and have no clue how to do them. I'm probably not even aware of the majority of these details.

So today, I started off with some basic jobs, tinkering with things to try and get some extremely basic hands-on experience. I figured out how the braking pads can be adjusted, by fastening the nut on the middle bolt of the braking system. I had a go at removing a complete wheel from the rear axle and removed the pulley that was installed by a previous owner. We'll be putting in gears at the other side of the axle later on, as the motor will be placed at the other side anyways. After strategically applying some WD40 here and there, we now have a smoothly rotating rear axle, which is great. Here's the rear axle without its pulley.

Originally, I wanted to get the bubbles out of the hydraulics lines of the braking system. The process to do this is called "bleeding"; while pumping the brakes and opening/closing the outlet at the brake, you can refill the brake lines with bubble-free braking fluid, which I found for 7€ at a car maintenance store. Unfortunately I only have two hands, so I'll hold this job until I get some help from two other hands.

I've been taking a look at where the motor block will be going. The carpenter rule in the next picture roughly shows the size of how big the engine mount will have to be and where it will be located. It will have a pretty big footprint, at about 20 by 20 cm. If we don't want to get rid of the plastic boxes on the sides of the kart, we'll need to access the tube which would end up in the left-middle of the mount.

Next up: getting those bubbles out of the brake lines and finding a seat!