Im with tubes380. I recon its a wast of time trying to reinvent the wheel. Mod and reinforce your existing frame (or get a new one for $70) would be a much better use of your time. Have a look at what Mack is doing.
Rolsy,
Don't listen to the guys that tell u to just buy a new frame, if you really do want to design and build one yourself then i say go nuts man. New inventions don't come about by people just buying whats already out there, people are always changing stuff in an attempt to make it better, thats what modding is all about.
It is not going to be an easy job though; its not as easy as slapping a few bits of steel together and welding it up in the shape you want.
Bike chassis are designed to have a certain degree of flex in them to aid the handling characteristics of the bike. MotoGP bikes can actually stiffen or soften their chassis to a certain degree as another form of adjustment.
Now, most mini bikes aren't exactly a Honda RCV1000 so i can't say for a fact that their chassis are "designed" to have this same function. Of course the chassis is going to flex but that may just be due to poor design rather than an actual characteristic of the bike.
I say go right ahead and design one yourself, get an engineer to look over it for you (if you cant find anyone else then i'll attempt to have a look myself), talk to some fabricators about how your going to manufacture it etc etc. Its going to be a costly experiment though, if your using chromolly which needs to be TIG welded for a good finish, your looking upwards of $40 per hour on labor, chromo is not cheap to buy, maybe $100 per meter depending on size plus getting it bent into the right shape is going to be a bitch coz of how brittle chromo is. You coud of course use steel which is cheap and strong but also heavy as a freight train. The last thing is something that was pointed out earlier, there is not much room at the front of a mini, your chassis rails would simply have to cradle the bore of the engine coz i don't believe there is any engine mounts on the head. Its gonna be tricky, but doable, perhaps a removable sub frame would work so u can still take the engine out sideways?
Weigh up how serious you are about the whole thing, if you've got time and money to burn then do it bro. It'd be sick to see a new kind of evolutionary chassis.
Good luck