JOEL'S MOPEDS

Why are you still hanging out here?

2011-05-19T11:12:00.001-07:00

Hey I've posted a couple of entries over on my new blog location. What are you doing still hanging out here? Go over there, NOW!

Hey, I'm back again!

2011-05-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

So I was sort of at a brick wall tuning wise until I figured out the whole fire hose of gas spewing onto my pant leg. It's tough to just casually ride a bike and tune it when getting near the thing requires a wardrobe change, a breathing mask, and post ride shower.
So I felt it was important to get myself an air filter to catch as much of that extra petrol as possible. I'm not really stoked on the K&N filters that have been getting popular these days. Though I'm sure they do a great job of high air flow while still filtering, they're just a little too oversized for my tastes.
After some searching I came across that Marchald filter I linked to in my last post. WOW! What a great filter. First off, it's really well made. Dual stage foams, metal base, and the rubber adapters that come with it are shaped like velocity stacks to improve the airflow.
I was really impressed at what you get for the price.

I'll test this out this week.
Just as a reminder, I'm switching my blog over to http://www.joelkvernmo.com/blog. Check it out.

Grand Rapids in the HOUSE!!! Literally.

2011-05-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

This week was F-U-N. And exhausting.
Gabe Bandit along with his friends Derek, Caleb, and Esther came to Seattle because they had a film in NFFTY.
Not content to merely attend a film festival and explore a new city, the Michigan natives decided to participate in a Grand Rapids 24 hour film festival remotely, submitting their project online.
If you're not familiar with the concept of a 24hr film fest, the idea is that participating film-making teams are given a theme, location, spoken line, and prop that must be included in all of the competitors films. Then you have 24 hrs from that moment to create a short film using only footage shot within that 24 hr period.
I tagged along and actually became the villain in the movie!

DEATHped made it's riding debut, and after a manic night of riding mopeds all over, and one narrow escape from the authorities, we wrapped filming at 9 am.
The judging for the film fest ends this weekend so once that ends perhaps I can get a vimeo file of the final product posted up here.
Derek, who acted as the Director of Photography snapped some really great shots over the course of the weekend and he graciously allowed me to post them up.

So like I said earlier, right before those crazy mid-westerners invaded Kastle Kvernmo, I finished DEATHped. I rode it quite a bit this weekend during shooting, and on Sunday I did some more fine tuning at a Mosquito Fleet fix-it day. I asked Derek to take DEATHped for a ride so that I could do a plug chop and when he returned he informed me that DEATHped had claimed it's first victim. In his words, "I was riding down 8th and it was hauling pretty good, and this little bird swooped in and it bounced off the headlight and into my visor. This is the final poop of a dead bird."

So apparently DEATHped is carnivorous.
Based on the advice of Naz and Shannon, I'm running it super rich right now, every once in a while I've gotten it to rev up high enough to actually hit the powerband and that's when things get exciting. For the most part though, it just kinda feels sluggy. Once I feel like it is broken in a little bit I'll get the jets a bit more tuned in. I think I may also switch out my front sprocket, I'm running 18 x 45 gearing right now and I'd like just a bit more torque. One thing that I need to change ASAP is the carb needs an air filter. I've heard that Gilardoni kits like to spit gas, but hooboy, my pant leg smells like I've been refining gasoline as a hobby. I walked into a bar and was asked if it was me that smelled like gas, because otherwise they were worried that they might have a natural gas leak in the kitchen. I like this filter and I'll check it out soon.
In other news, this blog is moving. Yes, moving to my other site; joelkvernmo.com. I'm trying to flesh out my site a bit more and I thought it would be nice to take my blog over there. I'll continue posting on both blogs for a little while but at some point I'll abandon this blog and continue over there.
Stay tuned for some rough cut moped footage from the 24 hr film and perhaps the finished product.

The coolest moped part I've ever made.

2011-04-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

Well, DEATHped is finally coming near to completion. The final missing pieces are in the mail, and I am just putting the finishing touches on the bike.

About three months ago, I started visualizing what seat would look best on the bike. I wanted it to be like a cafe seat but minimal, totally unique and sturdy. I started by making a small paper mockup about an inch long. I just sort of figured out what sort of folds I would need to do to make it work. Once I had a mockup, I disassembled the little paper seat and scanned it into my computer. I traced the template in Illustrator and extrapolated it to full scale. Then I printed out the template onto a cereal box, assembled the full size mockup, and tweaked and refined ad naseum.

It's really nice to be able to set a cardboard facsimile of a seat on your bike and scope out the lines and work it out. Eventually, I came up with a design I was happy with.

On Saturday I was lucky enough to get some time with Michael Mike down at the wizard lair. That guy is super generous with his time and skills and most every amazing moped project coming out of Seattle has his fingerprints on it. I filled him in on my plan and we quickly set to work.
First I transferred my template to the stainless steel.

Then I started hacking away with an angle grinder.

The Wizard himself began fusing the metal. If you look closely you'll see that he is actually absorbing the energy of the welder into his hand and welding with his magical fingertip.

After the welding was done I spent a significant amount of time shaping the tail section and this is what I came up with.

I'm pretty proud of it.

So this leaves me with only a couple more steps before I can declare DEATHped complete and ready to ravage. I'll be tuning the carb and clutch over the next couple of days and my final little bits should arrive today (monday). All that is left is to black out any chrome, (DEATH TO CHROME!) and take pretty photos for posterity. I'm very excited.

I just have to mention one more time that I couldn't have done any of this without the generous help of Michael Mike, Phil, Haulin' Colin, my supportive wife, and probably other people that are escaping my memory.

Blueberry wine, the plague, and Los Angeles

2011-04-22T12:15:00.001-07:00

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of art shows, motorcycle riding, and other fun things.
The Los Angeles Latebirds had a little get together down in Malibu and of course Rosanna and I simply had to attend. I didn't get many photos because I was so busy, so you'll just have to take me at my word that it was a spectacular weekend and I really love hanging with those fellas.

Flashback to a week before LA, my friend Sierra and I had been discussing doing a one night art show in her apartment. She's been doing these shows for some time now, she and her understanding boyfriend pack up most everything in their apartment, put it all in the closet, and host intimate art shows about twice a month. She's been calling it Vignettes.
So, like I said, Sierra and I had been discussing showing some of my work in the future and it became clear that the best time for both of us would be the night before I left for LA. That gave me just about a week to figure out what work I wanted to show and make about five new pieces. My art practice is pretty methodical, I usually have a pretty clear idea of my intention before I start creating, but sometimes it's good to have a deadline hanging over your head to stir the creative juices.
Here are some shots of the Moms on the internet. exhibition.

So the art show happened and it was great, and then we got to spend a wonderful few days with our friends down in LA, and then I got the plague. It started as a little cough and some congestion in my ears and eventually blossomed into full on 24 hour uncontrollable coughing. Oh, and pink eye. It was an awesome week.
After recovering from my various ailments, my friend Ryan and I racked our blueberry wine.

Here is dead-man-walking engaged-to-be-married Ryan with our batch of blueberries. When we began fermentation we combined some recipes and had a comedy of errors sort of day trying to get our ratios right. Eventually we came up with this list of ingredients:
9lbs blueberries
14lbs cane sugar
5 gals water
2 packets of Bordeaux yeast

As of the 13th of April our wine has been slowly fermenting away for 5 weeks and we have an alcohol percentage of 6%. We are shooting for around 14% so we're going to let it continue and hope for the best.

Here I am racking the wine.

Just look at that delicious ruby color of the blueberry juice. Yummy.
So in summary, life is pretty great! Spring is slowly teasing us here in Seattle, it looks like DEATHped might actually be completed this month, and I've proven that I can survive the plague.

Cider Batch 2 conclusion

2011-03-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago Rosanna and I opened a bottle of my homemade cider. It was fantastic. Very dry, dense tiny bubbles, and packed a strong kick. It was great. I started initial fermentation on that cider on January 7th, so that means it has been a process of about 2.5 months for the cider to fully mature.

Here is the recipe in bold for posterity, and I'll interject with some explanations throughout.

1-7-2011
4.75 gal Apple Juice
3.75 lbs white sugar
1 packet Champagne yeast
Potential Alcohol 11%
Cloudy orange coloring.

The potential alcohol is measured using a tool called a hydrometer. A hydrometer measures the gravity of a liquid in relation to the gravity of water. In lay-mans terms, water is measured as zero on a hydrometer, sugar adds density to the mixture, which the yeast will eat and turn into alcohol. So in this case my initial reading told me that I had a gravity of 1.081 or 11% potential alc. If the yeast eats all of the sugar, I would end up with an actual 11% alc. content cider.

Within 24 hrs a thick Krausen appeared, after cleaning the airlock a vigorous bubbling started within 72 hrs.

Krausen is the foam that erupts out of a just started batch of cider or beer. Unfortuneately I didn't get a picture of this ciders krausen, but here is someone elses:

(Photo from the Phillyist)

1/30/2011
First Racking
Potential alc.= 1%
therefore actual alc.= 10%
Significant Calrifying,moderate bubbling, strong apple scent from airlock

When brewing, the dead yeast and plant matter sinks to the bottom of the carboy. This gunk is called Lees. This is why I started with a cloudy mixture and over time it naturally clarifies. If a brew is left too long on the lees it can acquire what I've seen described on some websites as a "fecal taste". Gross. Racking is the process of moving the good stuff off of the lees into another clean container. Since all of the lees have now settled nicely on the bottom of the carboy it would be counterproductive to just pour out the cider so you have to remove it in such a way that doesn't disturb anything.

Racking when it comes down to it is just like siphoning gas. One hose goes from the first carboy into another, some sucking action, and everything transfers over nice and easy.

2/16/2011
Second Racking / Bottling
Potential Alc. = .5%
Actual alc. =~11%
added 1 cup corn sugar and 1 cup water for back carbonation
approx. 17 500ml bottles, 6 large mason jars, and a couple of random growlers.
Very clear amber coloring, sweet taste, weak fizz.

When corn sugar is added to a brew at the moment of bottling, the yeast fires up again and starts making CO2. Some people get impatient at this point and add too much sugar or a pinch too much of fresh yeast and the result is referred to as "bottle bombs".

3/27
C'est Magnifique!

Tomorrow I will have post about my next alcohol endeavor, here is a hint:

Hobbit Makeover

2011-03-28T09:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I have simple ideas that grow and grow until they boil over into madness.
Friday night I was able to successfully install a malossi 70cc kit on my hobbit, Fright Night.
So, when I heard that Brendan was going to be at his home fixing some bikes I naturally thought that it would be a great opportunity to PAINT THE ENTIRE BIKE. Really guys, this is a horrible idea, don't follow my example. If you want to hurt your back, get horribly frustrated multiple times throughout the day, and cause marital discord, by all means, go ahead and disassemble a bike, spray paint it in the rain, and reassemble it all in the same day.

My photo editing software is being weird at the moment so I wasn't able to get the photos off my camera, I'll update this post with more photos later, but here is one picture stolen from Brendans blog.

Before

In the background of this picture of marital bliss, you can see my hobbit disassembled, laying in pieces.

Painting the frame.

Hang drying the painted pieces (in the rain).

Semi-After, I'm still assembling it in this picture.

Note the angry grimace and determined stare. The light sprinkling of rain throughout the whole paint process added a nice splatter paint effect. Try to replicate it, I dare you.
I eventually got everything back together and triumphantly spewed exhaust into Brendans garage.

Juuuust about complete...

COMPLETE!

The following day Travis and Rosanna and I went for coffee and wouldn't you know it, that nice fellow lent me a weakends pipe. I got it bolted up and everything performed beautifully.

Just look at the difference between the stock hobbit pipe and an aftermarket pipe.

Considering that I traded my hercules for this bike, and Phil gave me the malossi kit sans ring, and some polini clutch springs, Travis is lending me a weakends pipe, and I spent $2 on spray paint... This bike will be very fast and I have spent $9 of my cold hard cash on it.
I still need to do some tuning of the carb before I am confident that I won't seize the cylinder, but all in all it was a very productive weekend.

New stuff, and the same old thing

2011-03-02T12:03:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I sit down to write a blog post I think, "this is going to be stupid. The progress I've made is too incremental for anyone else to care about. Does this little bit of work really warrant a whole blog update?" But then I hear Travis' voice saying, "Blog posts should just be like your own journal, don't worry about an 'audience'. It's not for them." Wise words indeed.

So I got the hobbit or "Fright Night" as I like to call it, running with the tillotson carburetor. I had got everything buttoned up earlier this week, but a series of dumb mishaps foiled my plans. First I drilled and tapped the pulse plate and threaded in the pulse fitting. When I attempted to torque down the fitting my man hands, (ok, AND a wrench) sheared it right off in the plate. Wow, what an annoying feeling.

After a long drive to the nearest hobby store, I managed to get another pulse fitting and I put everything together on the subframe. It was at this point that I realized I hadn't put a gasket under the pulse spacer, and then when I fixed that and dropped the frame down on to the subframe I pinched the fuel line between the intake and the frame causing a major gash in my fuel line. After fixing the fuel line in a janky manner, I pushed the hobbit all around my neighborhood attempting to bump start it and actually got it to fire up and putt a little bit but ultimately decided that I needed to put some more time into the installation before pronouncing it a success.
Well, this weekend I took some time and decided to do it right. I procured some actual motion pro fuel line, which I have to say works a lot better than the vinyl crap I usually have laying around. The motion pro stuff has a lot thicker sidewalls so I feel like it is much less prone to kinking. Here is the pulse line all hooked up to the carb.

I also decided that my beer-box gasket left a little to be desired so I re-cut another one out of some thick gasket material. Here is the whole carb-intake sandwich right before going into the bike.

I shot video documenting the whole process but when I sat down to edit it I thought, "wow, replacing a carb on a moped, quite possibly the most boring subject possible." So rather than a riveting narrative, I just put it to music and called it good.

18 with a bullet from Joel Kvernmo on Vimeo.

And what do you know, it runs! It started right up and goes like a banshee. Well, it goes like a slow banshee with a stock cylinder, stock pipe, and overly large carb. It's a bit gluggy. So now begins Fright Night Stage 2: The Search for a Malossi Ring and Pipe. I can get a ring for the malossi kit very easily but before I put that kit on I should probably have a pipe.

It's a very satisfying feeling to spend months on a project and finally be able to ride it around, but it's an even better feeling when that project can carry your butt up hills and to and from locations dependably for the same length of time it took you to build it. So what I'm saying is, it's all well and good to get this thing running, but the real success will be when I've ridden it for a while and can confidently say that I built it right.

I'm coming out of the lizard closet. I love geckos.

2011-02-16T10:17:00.000-08:00

Back in the 90's, Gecko clothing reigned. Everyone (in my very limited circle at 9 years old) had Gecko Hawaii tshirts, they were usually neon of some sort, and had a gecko wearing sunglasses. I'm having difficulty finding a good photo of the old Gecko Hawaii tshirts, but here is a pair of underwear that someone made from the kind of tshirt I'm describing:
(sidenote: this pair of undies comes from a girl that rosanna had a booth next to at a craft fair last year... wierd.)

The awesomeness of the shirts is probably what convinced me that I needed to get a pet gecko. I even hatched a plan to catch a gecko while on a family vacation but it turns out that it is illegal to kidnap and transport a gecko back to Washington. At least that's what my mom told me. Eventually, I forgot about my gecko lust and life went on.

Well, Rosanna and I just returned from a family trip to Hawaii and I'm happy to report that though Gecko Hawaii Apparel is difficult to find, the actual lizards are alive and thriving in Hawaii. Here I am hunting outside our rental house:

And here are some lizard shots that I snapped:

Upon our return I was overcome by an insatiable desire to work on mopeds. Last week, I picked up a 8/32" pneumatic fitting at a hobby store and set to working on my hobbit intake spacer plate (see my previous blog post).

Typically the smallest fitting that can be had at an auto parts stroe is closer to 1/2" threading which is much too big.
I picked up some 1/2" aluminum from online metals, who, by the way, are really nice guys, most of the time I dig through their scrap and they just give me the materials for free.
The downside to full time employment is that it makes it difficult for me to go visit Michael Mike at the Wizard Lair. Doing a project like this on his mill would take virtually no time at all, but as I can't get down there, I am forced to use a jigsaw, drill and dremel.

It's not beautiful, but it will certainly give me a clue whether I'm going the right direction.

Matt Smith has a plate of 3/8" that I may remake this plate out of, I think that 3/8" would be just the limit of how thin I can go and still have threading for the pulse fitting, If I do remake this one more time I should probably use a mill for a proper finish. In the meantime however, I now have a usable prototype. I just need to pull the hobbit apart and decide which side of the plate I want to tap in the pulse fitting.

UPDATE 3/4/2011:
A guy I know was recently spotted wearing this shirt. It's not Gecko, Hawaii, but the spirit is there.

Kinda cheesy, kinda cute

2011-02-09T12:40:00.000-08:00

I have some big stuff in the works and some moped videos to share but for now I'm going to Hawaii!!!

It's not ALWAYS the destination...

2011-01-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

...but sometimes the destination is pretty sweet too.

Thanks to Arianna for the picture.
Mopeds are fun. Fun to build, fun to ride, and fun to push beyond their intended limits. But sometimes in our quest to build the fastest, prettiest, and blastiest we lose sight of the fact that without friends to ride with, riding mopeds would just be another kooky hobby like pogo sticks or unicycles.

Homebrew Hobbit Monster post

2011-01-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a crazy, busy couple of weeks here at Kastle Kvernmo; weddings, Rosannas sisters in town, snow, I started work at Microsoft... somehow we managed to survive it all.

A while back I posted here about my tillotson carburetor experiments. Well, I'm gearing up for another bike project and I think I may have found the perfect tilly carb candidate.
Just for review sake, Tillotson carburetors are whats called a pumper carb. You would typically find pumper carbs on chainsaws, weedwackers, blowers, and recently competition go Karts. While conventional moped carbs such as the (bing, dellorto, mikuni, etc.) use a float bowl and gravity to draw fuel into the carb, a pumper carb uses a diaphragm and a pulse line to pull the fuel into the carb. A pulse line is tapped into the case either right at the crank, or between the reeds and the crankcase near the intake. The diaphragm is sort of like the head of a drum and when the motor is running it creates a pulse which "pumps" the diaphragm, drawing fuel through the carb, and then into the intake. Why would anyone want to go this route rather than the tried and true conventional carbs? Well, first off, it isn't dependent on gravity for its fuel feed, the carb can be mounted in any position. I think that one reason kart racers have adopted the pumper carbs is due to the high speed cornering they do which could cause some issues gravity fed carbs. Another reason is that instead of having to replace jets for fuel mixture adjustment, the carb has mixture screws that jet the carb with requiring any disassembly. This easy jetting feature is what initially drew me to tillotson carbs.
Here is what the high and low circuit jetting adjustments look like:

A little while back I acquired a Honda Hobbit from Phil aka Responsible Jon. Hobbits are great mopeds for a few reasons, pretty stiff tube frame, case inducted, dual variated, and they are relatively easy to find parts for. They do have one obvious downside though, and that is in order to access the carb the whole subframe must be dropped.
See the carb deep inside there? No? Well that's my point.

Granted, dropping the subframe is only a matter of one bolt, loosening the throttle cable, and watch out for the electrical wires and rear brake line, but dang, that's a lot more work than your typical carb access on a moped. My solution therefore, is to install a tillotson carb on my hobbit. Rather than tap into the crankcase I am going to make a spacer plate to slip under the reeds and intake. I'll tap and thread in a pneumatic nipple, and bolt it all up. Once I've done this jetting will be easy to adjust and when I decide to swap the stock cylinder for an aftermarket kit or change pipes I'll simply twist the circuit screws to jet accordingly.
The pulse plate:
As you can see I have traced the outline of the intake onto the block and I have begun removing material from the inside of the plate.

I'm not sure how much vertical clearance I have for my plate inside of the frame. Just eyeballing it, I would guess that the carb could be raised somewhere around a half inch.

I'm starting with a big chunk of 1" aluminum plate simply because it was laying around. If it turns out to be way too much I can use this as a template for another more modest plate or simply cut and mill it down.

Intake:
Amazingly, the stock hobbit intake mounts almost perfectly to the tillotson flange. I had to ream out the bolts holes a couple millimeters on the carb but otherwise it fits very nicely.

The tilly I'm using has about a 20mm bore but with the butterfly in there we'll call it 18mm.

So I put my dremel skills to the test and opened up the intake to around 19mm.

So that's in the works.

In other news, I've been making alcohol. Around Halloween Rosanna and I decided that we wanted to make some homemade Christmas gifts. I've always been intrigued by home brewing and cider seemed like a fairly simple project to get involved in.
So, I bought some cider in gallon glass jugs, got some yeast and airlocks, and started brewing away. I racked the cider at about 1 month and then on Christmas eve I bottled the product. Now, when we gave out the cider as gifts, I told everyone that received one that they should just keep it in their pantry until valentines day. Hopefully by that time the carbonation in the bottle will have built up nicely and the taste will have mellowed. However, based on my observations of my second batch I fear my first batch may not be very good. This second batch is performing SO AWESOME! The yeast started bubbling right away, a foamy ring has formed around the top of the cider, and I can see a lot of CO2 activity going on. With the last batch the fermentation wasn't nearly so obvious which leads me to believe it may not be so great. Here is my batch #2 method/recipe:
1 five gallon carboy
1 airlock
5 gallons of apple juice
3.75 pounds sugar
1 packet of champagne yeast

I sterilized everything, poured a couple of gallons of apple juice and all of the sugar into the carboy, and swished it all around for as long as I could in order to dissolve the sugar. I soaked the yeast in a little bowl of water to wake it up, added the yeast and most of the apple juice and sealed up everything with a little bit of vodka in the airlock. My dad got me a hydrometer (and the carboy, thanks dad!) for christmas so I was able to figure that by adding about 3.75lbs of sugar to the 5 gals of juice the potential alcohol content of the final product will be just about 11%. I hate super sweet cider so my goal is to have something akin to a dry apple champagne.
Here is a long video detailing my process:

Here is a short video of the carboy burping CO2. How exciting!

Speaking of "homebrew", last night I was searching for some information about homebrew and I came upon this magical remnant of internet days gone by; Ladies and gentlemen, I present the greatest website ever made..

Meat and Metal.

2010-12-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of grilling lately and I've tackled some new meats. For example, earlier this month I've cooked a brisket, two pork shoulders, baby back ribs, and made a really awesome stew.
Here are some pictures of the ribs:

I feel like I've learned a lot about how meat cooks from a chemical standpoint so it's been pretty fun. Also, for christmas Rosanna got this cookbook for me.

It's a really great book, it is a series of interviews with butchers and a couple of their favorite recipes. I think I'm going to make a tenderloin this week.

A couple of days before Christmas I went with Matt Smith down to the hinterlands of washington, I'm not sure where we were but I do know that we crossed the tacoma narrows bridge. We were on a rescue mission to pull an old dock out of the lake at his family's cabin. Here is "Man" Smith pulling the dock using only his pinkies.

The mopeds are still coming along nicely. I went to the wizard lair to do some serious damage on the mermaid bike.
I cut the forks down 2.5". Naz welded them and I think that it improved the stance a lot. At least now it doesn't look quite so American Choppers.
Before:

After:

I got the disc brake properly spaced and I cut a bunch of material out of the caliper bracket, it's looking pretty sexy now.

DEATHped still needs forks, I've put so much time and care into getting this bike just perfect, it would be a shame to put some plain EBR's on it. So I'm saving for hydros. The rear end is pretty much done, I just need to put on the rear gear and then the chain and a taillight. I'm not sure how I feel about the red and black pedal chain. Too much red? Nah, it's appropriately obnoxious.

As these bikes come close to completion my mind starts drifting towards the other projects. Do I immediately start souping up the hobbit? I have two puch frames now (a chopped maxi and a wierdo colorshift pinto), should I build another puch? Should I slap a polini on the derbi? Rebuild the Hercules so Phil has a running bike to ride in Seattle? Only time and monetary concerns will tell.

SO MUCH GOING ON!

2010-12-10T17:11:00.000-08:00

Wow, it has been a busy and productive week in Kastle Kvernmo.
On Saturday we had a crowd of Mosquito Fleeters over for a holiday dinner. Eighteen people all stuffed into our tiny home around one long table. It was great. My contribution for the dinner was one 9 lb pork shoulder. I put the rub on the meat a couple of days ahead of time and let it sit in the fridge. The morning of the dinner I got up to start the grill at 3:30 am. I tended the meat all day and by 5:00 pm it was deeeeelicious. Sadly though, I have no photo evidence of the magnificent feast.
UPDATE: one out of focus polaroid was found as evidence of the debauchery:

DEATHped finally has some appropriate shocks, I ordered some 320mm adjustables. I really think that the black fits nicely. The wheels are currently being trued by none other than Haulin' Colin.

The Mermaid bike is really taking shape. Rosanna and I started assembling the parts and it is really coming together nicely. The disc brake assembly is fitting well and once I have everything perfectly fitted I will start hacking the caliper bracket down to a more aesthetically pleasing shape.

The bike as a whole is finally rolling. Some things remain; chains, a pipe, a seat, handlebars, and cables, but really this is a far sight further along than ever.

This tank is of course not THE mermaid tank but merely a placeholder. The forks need to be shortened by about two and a half inches which I hear is a relatively simple process.
I'll tease you with a glimpse of a project Rosanna and I have been working on. Can you spy what this is?

And finally, in sad news, Phil (Responsible Jon) and his wife have moved to Indiana. It's too bad they had to go but they have an opportunity too good to pass up. I helped them pack up the truck and they stayed one night with Rosanna and I before they hit the ol' dusty trail. Here, in video form, is their last rainy moments in Seattle.

Back in the day.

2010-11-28T16:44:00.001-08:00

It's winter. So as I spend more time in my house I become increasingly aware of the junk that somehow took root in my house. Rosanna and I are purging clothes we don't need, dvd's, cd's, books, all the kind of stuff a person keeps around because it has some sort of nostalgic value but in reality is just trash cluttering up ones personal space. At the same time, I began doing a digital cleaning of my old hard drives and I stumbled upon some old rough cuts of the moped documentary I started and never finished.
Back in 2006 I was in a video art class, (I believe it was Video 301 or something) and our project for the semester was to make a documentary. I had a friend who was involved in the moped scene here in Seattle so I figured I'd give her a call and see what those scooter things were all about. I followed the Mosquito Fleet around and filmed them doing their thing for a while, I bought my own moped, went to a rally in Arizona, and generally just got to know some great people and had a lot of fun. Eventually, I became less interested in taping and more interested in fixing bikes and riding. I also had a serious lack of confidence as to where the doc was going so I have a few drastically different rough cuts of my footage.

I've currently exceeded my Vimeo limit for the week so I'll update this post later with another video.
Enjoy!

Moped Doc Trailer from Joel Kvernmo

Moped Doc Arizona from Joel Kvernmo

Update:
Another video

Making a disc brake.

2010-11-24T15:52:00.000-08:00

A while back Rosanna was riding old red and gold maxi and kept mentioning how bad her brakes were. I must admit I didn't consider her concerns to be in urgent need of attention until I had an opportunity to ride the bike myself. What she described as "doesn't brake very well" was in reality a complete lack of brakes. It was a truly hair raising experience. I tried a few times to improve the brakes by sanding down the drums, putting in new shoes, changing out the brake lines, nothing seemed to improve the situation.

So, when Rosanna hatched her plan to build a custom Pinto, I was determined that her brakes be over built. I want her to be able to stop on a dime. So while many people are adapting motorcycle disc brake setups, I thought that I would adapt a mountain bike disc brake setup. There are a few reasons for this:
A) Bicycle disc brakes are relatively cheap.
B)The calipers come in very good quality cable operated versions. My plan is to use the stock moped levers.
C) The challenge, man!

The first task was to make an insert that would replace the existing brake hub. I managed to purchase some aluminum stock from online metals for about $10. I headed down to the wizard lair and turned the insert, drilled and tapped it. This was certainly the most time consuming part of the process.

So as you can see here, I have drilled and tapped for the disc, and I have drilled and tapped the insert to keep it from spinning on the hub.

And then here you can see Rosanna's beautifully powdercoated wheel has matching mount holes.

Here are all the parts. Up in the top right corner you can see the bracket I made for the caliper. The round hole mounts on the axle and the slot goes on the existing brake stop.

I still have a little bit of work to go before this wheel is complete, spacers need to be cut for the bearings and the hub insert and the brake caliper. But now that the wheel has been powdercoated we are a lot further along. Exciting!!!

Well hello mr. hoobit.

2010-11-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

Phil gave me a hobbit. Well, by gave I mean I said, "How about I trade you my 2 speed hercules for the hobbit and your forks?" And he said, "Sounds fair, but how about I just leave the Hercules at your house?"
So now I have a hobbit. Which is great!

I took the hobbit over to Travis' garage the other day to see if we couldn't get'r running.
Travis was concerned about how much the rear wheel was dragging so we popped the freewheel off to access the brake plate and this is what we discovered.

So in the first photo, you can see on the left the brake drum liner that has separated from the brake hub, and then proceeded to swirl around and around within the hub. The second picture shows the mangled up brake shoes and somehow a large tangle of brake cable also got in there?
Travis was very amused.

The bike was originally missing some things, a tank, a petcock, an exhaust pipe, and brake shoes. But with Travis' generosity we scrounged up some spare parts and got it running. I still need to do a little bit of work on it, there's currently no lights and it needs a new rear tube, but all in all in should be a great little loaner.

DEATHped is still coming along, I've reach a financial impasse so hopefully on I'll be able to finish it up.

DEATHtank and various other things.

2010-10-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

Oh man! DEATHped is getting close. Yesterday I went to the wizard lair and got a lot of work done. I got the tank, magneto cover, and headlight bucket all powdercoated in a deathly wrinkle black.

I'm not entirely positive what the deal is with that bike, but when I held that tank in it's completed form something happened.

It's probably nothing. Anyway, the bike is starting to come together nicely, I still need some essentials; forks, shocks, seat, tires, chains, etc. But really, I swear, it's coming together.

The wheels are pretty much done, just truing remains. Just for info sake, the final equipment needed to convert loose bearing leilu (sp?) wheels to sealed bearings are:
-180mm M12 bolt x1 + washer and lock nut
-150mm M12 bolt x1 + washer and lock nut
- 6001zz sealed bearing x4
-.5mm shim stock
-Loctite 262
-.5" Nom. Aluminum Pipe
Estimated cost, ~$30.
I also got an 18 tooth freewheel which should give me a little more pedaling speed. Probably unnecessary, but neat nevertheless.

LA

2010-10-22T13:02:00.001-07:00

Whenever I get home from LA there are never enough photos to fully illustrate everything that went down. But on the other hand, maybe it's better that way.
Here is a couple of rad dudes that always treat us right.

I'm the sort of person that doesn't really like arguments or overly opinionated people. Usually if I disagree with someone I'll just keep it to myself. But for some reason there always comes a moment at parties when I'm yelling at everyone within earshot about how Dick's drive-in is far superior to In-n-Out, or how the Seahawks were robbed by the refs during Supersham XL, or sometimes I'm just screaming "Everybody Dance Now!" Rosanna thinks it's obnoxious but I think I'm awesome. I'M AWESOME OK!? Why's everyone leaving the room? Oh yeah, the reason that I'm saying all of this is because at some point at this party I was screaming about the Seahawks. And then the next day, surrounded by Chicago transplants, I witnessed the Seahawks beat the Bears. Booyah!
Anyway, Jed of the Latebirds has recently begun honing his tattoo skills and what better way to practice than on your poor decision making friends?

Here Craig and I are modeling the latest design from Altru Apparel, Cam makes a great model.

The next day Nik took Rosanna and I to the Getty. I must say that I was blown away by the architecture. What an amazing place. If you have the opportunity to visit I would highly suggest it.

And lastly, a photo of Cam on his first day at Folsom Prison.

Converting to sealed bearings

2010-10-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

Converting loose bearing wheels to sealed bearings has always been a difficult and time consuming effort for me. But I really think that if done correctly the product is worth it. The leleu wheels that I am using have an OD of 29mm. That's a problem because the bearing sizes I want come in 28mm or 30mm.
Yesterday I stopped by the wizards lair and asked phil if they had any pipe I could turn in order to make a shim for 28mm bearings. If you were keeping track that would mean I'm making .5mm shims. That's small and probably too difficult to turn in a lathe. Phil suggested I go get some shim stock. I didnt know that this stuff existed! It's great. I was able to stop by online metals and pick up some .5mm shim stock and since it was scrap they just gave it to me for free.

Anyway, I got the shim material, cut it down with my dremel and trimmed it fit.

All in all it's been super simple and easy. I still need to use some red loc-tite to seal it in place and I need some length of pipe to keep the bearings from being pulled in on each other.

The bearings i used were 6001zz. With this setup I'll be running 12mm axles. Stoked!

DEATHwheels

2010-10-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

DEATHped progress

2010-10-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Catalina for a few days so I've been working hard on the DEATHped. Man, with a name like that, it would be a real shame if I actually died on it... anywhoodles, it's coming along swimmingly.
I started by meticulously cleaning and assembling the engine, then I wanted to see how it would look with the yellow sebacs I had laying around, and then I figured I should throw some wheels on it to check the stance, and now it's actually looking like a moped. Amazing!

I am for sure not going to use these wheels or these forks, I'm waiting to buy some black EBRs, (unless some benevolent soul wants to give me some?) and Phil is currently powdercoating some spokers for me.
Phil said that he would work on perhaps getting me my wheels this evening. Fingers crossed.

It is really nice to build a bike without rushing it. I can disassemble and reassemble things as I discover issues rather than building it with my usual, "I have to get this done tonight or I won't have anything to ride!" For example I don't want any wires showing if I can help it, so I drilled a tiny hole in the frame near the motor mount and that is where my taillight wire pops out. Another pet peeve of mine is when someone does a meticulous and beautiful pinto build and then bolts the coil right above their front wheel. Like this:
Gross. So I spent some time figuring and I managed to bolt my cdi coil onto the case nice and discretely. There is a small section of case that sticks out like a tab in-board of the flywheel. I just drilled a mounting hole and bolted it in.

And lastly, here is my motomatic N8p all bolted up. They made me this pipe way back in the day and it had gotten really dented and gnarly so last year when we headed to the Latebird Invitational I dropped it off for a restore. They did a great job. They replaced the header, angled the flange to fit a gila, took out all of the dented sections, and generally cleaned it up, as well as giving it a nice new powdercoat job. Their fit tolerances are perfect. I told them it was for a gila on a pinto frame and the mounting bracket fits just right. Also, I'm a big fan of pipes that kick up a little bit, so this thing really makes me happy.

Oh yeah, I threw those sebacs on there. I can't decide if they fit or not. I was starting to feel that when this thing is done there might be too much red and black so the splash of yellow might be a racy contrast. Any thoughts? Bear in mind that I'm color blind so most of the time my color choices are cranked to the max.

Football

2010-10-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

It's sunday and I'm watching the Seahawks. I love football and for me the Seahawks represent the old, blue collar days of Seattle. Before Amazon, Microsoft, and the general tech boom transition this city has made.
The ultimate Seahawk will always be Steve Largent. He was white, small, and a real nice guy. But he was an amazing wide receiver and was the coolest when I was a little kid.

Here's what wikipedia says: When Largent retired, he held all major NFL receiving records, including: most receptions in a career (819), most receiving yards in a career (13,089), and most touchdown receptions (100). He was also in possession of a then-record streak of 177 consecutive regular-season games with a reception.

In 1988 Steve Largent proved what a badass he was. Earlier in the '88 season Denver player Mike Hardin threw a right forearm to the left side of Largent's face, shattering the facemask, dislodging teeth and leaving Largent briefly unconscious and with a sprained left knee. The next time Denver played the Seahawks you could really see the tension. Check out 1:19 when Largent gets riled up at the refs call and yells into the refs mic. And then at 2:08 Largent demolishes Mike Hardin after Hardin intercepts a pass. Man, what a guy.

Catalina Dive, September 29th

2010-10-01T11:28:00.001-07:00

Whoo! I've been on the water a lot these past few days. At night I feel like I'm still swaying on the boat and I rock back and forth in my chair.
The snorkeling in the cove right here on the USC campus is really incredible. I've seen Bat Rays, Leopard sharks, Garibaldis, and lot's of other kinds of fish. The Bat Rays and Leopard Sharks were huge! Unfortunately, I don't have an underwater camera housing so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Here is some photos from our sub operation on September 29th:
Sunset 9/28

Sunrise 9/29

Ryan getting the shot.

Gearing up and heading out for the dive.

Antipodes by the caves.

Sunset 9/29

I've also gotten really good at handling an outboard motor. Here I am transporting people in the tender boat.

Catalina Island, USC campus

2010-09-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

Jaques Costeau's Diving Bell

Awesome Logo

Sunset

Long Exposure

Bison Face-off

Mosey On

The Greatest T-shirt ever made.

Boooooring.

2010-09-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

Slowly but surely DEATHped Mark 1 is coming together. I spent Saturday down at the Wizard's Lair working on DEATHped.

I brought Phil my fuel tank and he quickly set to work sandblasting it to prepare it for it's eventual deathly black appearance.

Naz was welding away on Hucker Steves pipe. Look at that crack!

I was busy boring away at my engine case so it would mate oh so perfectly with my monster gila kit.

I think it came out pretty nice. This case is my trusty polini matched case that I got from Seth many years ago. It's amazing that even though the polini cylinder is pretty dramatically different than the Gila, the port matching that I will have to do to match is pretty minimal. Neat!

In other news, I got a job about three months ago. An adult job. Currently I am the Marketing Coordinator for a company called OceanGate. We provide services to researchers that want to dive underwater to depths unavailable via scuba. In other words, we have a submarine and we take people deep. 936 ft. deep.
So right now I am at the USC research campus on Catalina Island. I'll be here on and off for the next month so I'm excited to visit the Latebirds at some point.
Here's the sub!

Here I am learning how to use an ROV in the Manhaus pool.

And here is a vista we saw as we 4x4'd to the campus yesterday.

Nice little cruise-about.

2010-09-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

This weekend we went on a little ride. It rained for a while in the morning, and we waited it out. Eventually the skies cleared and we stretched our legs in the woods.

I found this Sea-doo seat on the side of the road. Topseat mopeds are the new Toptank mopeds. And riding mopeds with a man is way cooler than riding doubles with a cute girl. I swear. Welcome to the future.

Little Big Rigs' Big Day Out

2010-08-30T15:54:00.001-07:00

Our truck has been in need of attention for quite some time.
The clutch was slipping pretty badly and halfway through blood drive the brake pedal began going all the way to the floor. scary!

So after a month or so of postponing the inevitable, my awesome dad volunteered to help me overhaul Little Big Rig.

First up, new master cylinder.

After replacing the master cylinder we pulled all the wheels off and put new brake pads on.
Front:

Back:

Next we attacked the drive train and transmission in order to drop the bell housing and replace that old slippery clutch.

Working as a team.

Bell Housing

Getting out that old clutch.

When the job was done, even the lady folk came out to wash and wax Little Big Rig and give him some much needed love and attention.

We were rewarded for our work with one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen.

I have to say that there is no way I could ever have done any of this without my dad. I really appreciate his company. He's not too feeble for an old 60 year old and his mind isn't completely gone yet.

Ok Little Big Rig. When's the next cross country trip?

It's summertime!

2010-07-24T12:53:00.000-07:00

I love this city. And when summer eventually arrives, Seattle is glorious.

We've been going to Gas Works park.
Matt Smith contemplated his former life as a world traveling mariner.

We had a fantastic rally. A lot of friends came to visit.

Thanks for the photo Chris.

I just got my pinto frame back from Responsible John, and boy does it look sweet.

This bike is going to look really mean. Little children will cry when I ride by and my neighbors will stare in horror as I run over their animals and the sound coming from the exhaust pipe will lay waste to all glass within one mile.
Travis says that he is going to build one just like it but with reverse colors. The only problem is that he keeps calling it Cherry Red. This is Mirror Red. Geez get it right, Travis.

SAY WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

2010-06-16T16:44:00.001-07:00

They run. Both of them. How well and with what amount of dependability is yet to be seen. The film fest is over and now all I wanna do is moped work on mopeds work work on mopeds!

This is the song that my moped plays when I ride it.

Rosanna's bike:

-naz'd weights
-lathed variator
-18mm intake
-18mm phbg
-tjt springs
-Zen 65cc pipe
-stock cylinder

My Bike:

-naz'd weights
-lathed variator
-tjt springs
-15mm SHA
-Metrakit pipe
-stock cylinder

They're both getting some cosmetic changes soon but I just wanted to say how stoked I am that we have two running mopeds again!

Reasons to simplify your wiring.

2010-06-08T13:09:00.001-07:00

For the last week or so I have been struggling to figure out What is wrong with Rosanna's new Derbi.

I have the jetting pretty good but for some reason when I would pull up to a stop sign the bike would die. Now, on the surface this sounds like a jetting issue, perhaps I should just change the idle jet and get it to idle higher...

But I've been doing that for days! With the same problems still persisting. This morning I was about to give up on the 18mm PHBG and go back to the 15mm SHA, when it struck me, it only exhibits this issue when I am slowing down. Could it be that somehow the brake light switch was causing the electrical to short?
So I pulled the wires off of the switch and tried to start it up. Nothing. I pinched the wires together and it started immediately.

OH FRABJOUS DAY! I figured it out! So, in my joy I stripped the switches off the bike and decided that it would be solid enough to ride to work, (I told Rosanna to standby in case I broke down on my way). I am really stoked that it was something so simple and hopefully Rosanna will be able to commute without fear of breakdowns soon enough.

Oh, yeah and speaking of bikes breaking down, BLOOD DRIVE 7 is coming up. If you're coming you should register, dawg.

One of these is not like the other.

2010-05-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

I'm nearly done with Rosanna's bike. I finished the fuel system and I was able to get it to idle.

All I need now is a throttle cable and we'll be ready to go.

Here is a picture of the derbi clutch that is missing all of the material on one arm:

Travis was kind enough to give me a hobbit clutch that is nearly identical.

But there is one major difference... can you spot it?
Hobbit clutches spin the opposite direction so I had to modify the derbi clutch plate a little and I had to drill out the hobbit clutch arm because the mounting post is slightly larger on a derbi. Once I had that done, I put some TJT's on and I think this thing is ready.

I'm pretty excited for these projects to get done, though solving problems and working on these things is pretty fun too.

In completely unrelated news, someone posted this video in the members forum of mopedarmy and I remembered what an amazing summer song it is. When I was growing up my family was totally into waterskiing and Alan Jackson's goofy revelry in '80s/'90s cheesiness really takes me back. Enjoy.

Working on Derbi Too

2010-05-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

So rosanna's new bike needed some love so every day I've been putting in a couple hours of wrenching before I head off to work. Apparently the cracked petcock is a chronic issue with derbis because when I looked into the body I noticed that the petcock on this bike had been replaced with a rubber grommet and just straight fuel line. Fuel line that was too big for any of the carb banjos I have. Finding myself covered in gas is becoming a disconcerting trend.
Here is the solution I (really Michael Mike) came up with:

I lathed a piece of delron to 16mm and then tapped it to fit this barb fitting. I'm going to get an inline fuel valve and then we should be good to go.

I should also mention that this last wednesday I had an opportunity to head to the Responsible Naz's Shop of Wonders. I worked like crazy trying to make progress on as many projects as possible. I was able to make seat supports for the pintos, lathe the above fuel adapter, lathe some lighter variator weights, Naz welded me a big intake for Rosanna's bike, and I discovered that one of her clutch pads has no mo material.

Here is the intake we made:

And here it is in the frame with a nice little air filter. Also, you can see the fuel solution the previous owner came up with and how I had to use a socket to cut off the fuel flow:

In related news, Rosanna got some new parts in the mail. We decided to try out this pipe made by Zen. So far it looks like a really quality pipe, spring mounted, hydroformed, and really solid construction.
Once we weld on a support brace it will be ready to rip.

Check out this support brace at the stinger, it's just one nice quality detail of this pipe:

That's all for now! More later I'm sure.

Gila kits are crazy. and awesome.

2010-05-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

The dual Kvernmo Pinto projects are coming along slowly but surely, every day a little closer.
Recently I bought a Gilardoni kit. These things really are beautiful. They have a HUGE reed cage and just really nice finishing all around.

And look at the difference between the gila reeds and the 4 petal polini:

I took these photos this morning with the intention that the crappy pictures on the moped army wiki of puch kits could be updated, do you have a puch kit and the ability to take pictures that aren't blurry? Help me, help the wiki.

I'm an idiot.

2010-05-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

So, it turns out that the Derbi was out of gas. the stock Derbi petcock looks like this:

The tank of a derbi variant is plastic and so rather than having a petcock that threads on, the petcock slips inside the outlet a the base of the tank and then a hose clamp secures it in place.

Now, if this petcock had been made with metal it would have been great. The problem is that every time someone needs to change the jetting in the carb, you have to push the petcock out of the way and eventually all of this tweaking just makes the plastic valve portion of the petcock crack and leak and then drain all of your gas out. I'm working on a solution right now but since I currently working, I don't have much time for moped work.
Here is where the crack is on my petcock:

One idea that I came up with was to take a pinto petcock (12mm) and adapt it to fit the 16mm opening of the tank. I called my dad and asked for his advice and he suggested wrapping the pinto petcock in teflon tape.

It didn't work.
So, Jona from the Ghostriders is sending me a replacement stock petcock and hopefully that will do me just fine.

In other news, I did get some TJT clutch springs.

Travis has been telling me that these particular springs are a necessity and in the brief test ride I took I have to agree. From a dead stop they really rev up nice and high before engaging which creates a sensation like popping the clutch on a manual transmission. Rooooom!!! BraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! That's what it sounds like.

Update: Rosanna just traded old Red and Gold for this...

This one is for my baby boo.

2010-05-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

So the derbi is still a little sick. Not pooping your pants sick, just like a cold that won't go away.
Specifically, everything is running good, the jetting is pretty much right on, the timing is extra nice, and the bike goes at a pretty good clip, however, right about when I get up to top speed and I'm thinking, "Yeah! Finally this thing is solid." And then it goes, "Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah." If you can't figure out what that onomatopoeia means, basically it's like I run out of gas instantly. Not the zing noise like a seize, or a sputter noise like a fouled plug, no this is like I just cut the kill switch or ran the tank dry instantly. I have a theory that involves fuel flow but I can't be sure.
So in the meantime while I try to figure out the inexplicable, I'm improving the things that I DO know how to fix.

1) 12mm x 220mm Super Strong 10.9 axle.

This is 20mm longer than the stock axle. I really wanted the low-end power and long seat of the derbi to be put to good use so I bought some buddy pegs and this longer heavy duty axle so my boo can ride on the back. I'm really excited, we'll see how excited Rosanna is.

2)M6 set screws for my variator weights.

So Naz in his infinite handiness turned some weights for me out of a plastic material called Delron. Isn't Delron a mans name? Anyway, this material is pretty much perfect for variator weights if not just a tiny little bit too light. Hmmm how to increase the weight just a tiny little bit... Ah HAH! By tapping those delron weights with a tiny M6 set screw I can incrementally increase the weight. (By the way this was in no way my brilliant idea. This is all Naz, all the time.) So I bought two sets, M6 x 6mm and M6 x 8mm. Hopefully they should do the trick.

3)TJT Clutch Springs

I haven't been home to look at these things yet but I should have these fancy lads sitting on my desk when I get home.

WAIT A SECOND!!!

While googling for the pictures above, I found these pictures from the netherrealm of Cupertino:

What the What?!
Well apparently the cuperteens have already done the EXACT same pipe modification that I did but they beat me by about 10 months. Dang. Well, good job gentlemen, you reign supreme in the land of Derbi.

Still Trying to fix the Derbi.

2010-04-24T15:40:00.000-07:00

So I pulled apart the derbi case and discovered that yes indeed, the engine seizure was due to a bearing on the crankshaft freezing up. Why would that happen, I wonder? I suppose it could be due to lack of lubrication, though the unburnt oil from the 50:1 should be lubing it, or it could be that this is a 31 year old bearing and at some point it's going to say NO MORE.

Since I had borrowed a bearing puller from Naz I decided to rebuild one of my puch motors while I was at it. While I was working on this I had a realization:
Almost everyone I know pulls the rubber seals off the bearings when they install them on the crank. But those seals are to protect the bearing from contamination such as bits of metal getting mixed in with the bearing when you seize your cylinder. Does it make more sense to keep the rubber on? Is there a possibility of the rubber melting within the crankcase?

Here is a picture of the E50 I rebuilt:

This motor will go very fast, it was ripping before but it wouldn't idle very well which I discovered was due to the crank bearings being totally shot.
-port-matched case
-70cc Athena Piston port kit
-19mm intake
-20mm PHBG
-3 shoe clutch
-magic

Ok, back to the derbi. As it turns out, the flat reed bearing sizes were different than a variant. Here are the bearings that I pulled out of my piston port case:
-6303 (this is the one that seized) on one side of the crank
-6302 (other side of the crankshaft)
-6203 (though this one actually just says "203", I'm assuming that it is the same as a 6203)

And in case anyone else is rebuilding a piston port variant from 1979, here are the seals:
-15.30.7
-17.28.6 x 2
-16.24.4 x 2 for the pedal shaft

In other news I just sold old Orange and Black Maxi. That bike has been with me for a long time in various incarnations and I was a little sad to see it go. The orange and black front end was one of the first things powdercoated by Mike Rafter and the Motomatic Team and after sending everything to me he said, "I will NEVER powdercoat EBR's again." Also, this bike took second place in the Latebirds Invitational Club Relay Race. And considering first place was this bike which won the Polini Cup, that's pretty decent. But, it's departure means more money for moped parts and it went to a good home so I'm sure it will continue to rip around Seattle for many more years.

The last few moments of me and Ol' Orange and Black:

Whenever I see a picture of myself standing next to one of my mopeds I am struck with how little mopeds are. Or I am a giant. Could be both.

Gotta peel off the Mosquito Fleet badging.

That's all for now, peds are gonna roll!

Derbis are weird.

2010-04-15T22:23:00.000-07:00

First off, in my last post I mentioned that my piston and cylinder were pristine. Here are some photos:

As you can see, there is a little but of scoring but really it's not too bad. The rings look good and based on the performance right before the seizure(?) it seems like it's all good.

In other news, I got some new treats! First off, I'm a big fan of quality controls. Like these! These new controls are really cool. Long pull throttle, moped length tube, nice S shaped levers, and neat little levers for choke and decomp.

I also got some new reed material for my polini reed setup. Green reeds, .35mm of thickness will take me to the promise land of speed!

So I began digging elbow deep into the derbi, and I discovered some things:

Derbi swingarms are really solid.

Also, Derbi was REALLY into branding everything they manufactured.

Pop quiz: In front of you is four pullers. What do they have in common?

Answer: None of them fit into this flywheel. Looks like I'm in the market for a three jaw puller. Or at least in the market for borrowing one.

When I pulled the cylinder and head off the Derbi I discovered this HUGE spacer/ gasket. Based on the thickness of a cylinder ring I'd guess this thing is 3mm thick. I don't understand at all. Is this necessary so the piston won't hit the head? Wouldn't this raise the timing? or is the cylinder decked so the spacer is necessary for timing? I don't know.

And lastly is the pipe that Naz and I cut and rewelded. Naz did such a good job rewelding the header after we cut it that it looks like it's always been that way.

Anyhow, that's whats up in my shop. I hear that there is some scooter rally going on in Kentucky this weekend. Wish I could be there but them's the breaks.

OH NOES!

2010-04-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

Monday I was riding to the Mars Bar and cruising down 8th st in Ballard which is pretty much a slight downward incline for a couple of miles.

I was enjoying my new derbi, and just kind of blissfully riding when I thought, "You know, Phil is right, I shouldn't kit this thing. It goes plenty fast on 50cc and this way it will be more dependable." SQUELCH! The back tire locked up and I skidded for about 50 feet.

My initial thought was that I hard seized the motor... but how could that be? I pulled the plug and it looked perfect, I didn't notice any loud blats right before it seized that would indicate an exhaust leak or a massive case seal blowout...

Well, this morning I took the head off and the piston and cylinder look... spotless. Pristine. I removed the jug and have come to the preliminary conclusion that the crankcase bearings kicked the bucket. I'll post some pictures later, in the meantime, any derbi gurus know what size bearings and seals I need to get to rebuild this engine?

*Update*
I read up in the Variant Manual and it looks like these are the bearing sizes:
Crankshaft - 6203/ 17.40.12 and 6204/ 20.47.14
Main Gear - 6301/ 12.37.12 and 6302/ 15.42.13

Now, the diagram in the manual shows a case inducted engine and I'll be rebuilding a piston port, but we'll see if the bearings are the same size.

DERBI

2010-04-09T23:32:00.000-07:00

Recently I bought this bike and brought it home from LA:

I was really excited to finally have a derbi to play with and this was to be my first foray into variated bikes. Lucky for me the Mosquito Fleet has some really talented and helpful people. Within a few days of me returning from the Latebirds invitational Michael Mike and I had done the following improvements:
-I had naz lathe off the restricting collar on the variator cheek
-he turned some lighter weights out of delron
-we welded a nut onto the wheel adjuster that was stripped
-we cut the header on the pipe and rotated it so that the pedals clear and the stinger kicks up at a radical angle like a simonini
-I swapped the stock 12-12 carb for a 15 SHA
-we properly spaced the front axle so that the bearings weren't just floating from side to side
-took off the crazy stock handlebars with the welded on perches and made a neat little handlebar bridge (This is one thing that drives me nuts about Derbis, the triple tree is so long that the top plate is wavy shaped and it's difficult to replace the bad stock handlebars with new nice handlebars, also, what if these forks give out? What forks have the same length head tube?)

I've been slowly going over the bike finding sketchy things and making them ultra solid so that when I'm wheelie-ing down the road with rosanna on the back I won't have to worry about whether or not the front wheel is going to fall off or if the variator is going to spin off into my leg.

Today I made some really nice aesthetic and functional improvements to the bike:
I put on some neat low rise handlebars and some new red grips, and during the process decided to simplify the wiring.

I HATE messy handlebars and the bane of my existence is ugly switches and a snarl of wires. So I had the great idea to put little switches on the riser that Michael Mike made me:

As you'll notice, there is a red switch for killing the bike and a yellow one for going into ninja mode (lights out). The caveat to ninja mode is that with the lightened variator weights when this thing is running reved (revved? rev'd?) out it is very loud. It sounds like an angry weed wacker fighting a cheetah.

Last but not least of my favorite things about this bike, the sweet ass pipe.

This was a Metrakit pipe that was right in the way of the pedals. I've always like the swept up angle that simonini's have so while Michael Mike and I were refitting this pipe to clear the pedals I positioned it in such a way that it looks really nice and aggressive. I love it. I couldn't be happier.

Further possible improvements on the way:
-New Seat. I love the stitching and the logo on this stock seat but alas it is rusted through and won't last much longer. I'm thinking about putting on either a Brooks saddle or that neat futuristic cafe seat from polini. NOT. Actually I'm thinking more along the lines of this:

-Install foot pegs so my boo can ride doubles
-Powdercoat. But what color?
-New shocks
-New Forks?
-Puch Reed kit? I have a polini four petal and a kit just sitting here. Oh the possibibilities!

When can we stop being called hipsters?

2010-04-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

Seriously. There are two things that squares say when they feel inadequate compared to someone younger/cooler:
1) call them a hipster
2) support their hipster claim by pointing out ironic choices the hipster in question made.

Has anyone here ever worn something explicitly to be ironic? It's such an easy game to play! "Hey look at that hipster with his ironic bob marley shirt and and his ironic bongo." That's called a hippy, friendo, not a hipster.

Am I right?!

Special thanks to die hipster for supporting my theory with every post.

Smart guy, questionable solution.

2010-01-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

Here in Palm Springs we don't have a lot of leisure time.

However, every once in a while we get to do fun things... things like applying a jankety fix to a moped!

The Peddy Cash's Illustrious Craig Doty is working down here with me and he is now officially on his second magneto. For some reason the point that attached to the crank keeps separating from the heavy spinning magnet part.

Craigs solution? The friend of shade tree mechanics everywhere, JB weld.

Stay tuned to witness the aftermath.

"Blast those kids that think they own the road."

2009-12-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

For the last couple of years, my wife Rosanna has been riding the first moped I ever built. It's still a pretty speedy bike considering that the only features that are not stock are the estoril pipe and the 15mm bing carb. Sadly though, it has been looking a little shabby as of late. The paint is chipping, the brakes are bad, and the taillight has fallen off.
Now that my fellow UMMU brother has started up his powdercoating operation, I think that a restoration of this bike will soon be in order. In the meantime though, I've been working on some projects that will hopefully make this bike, as well as all mopedkind less death-trappy.
Today Rosanna and I are in Long Beach, California visiting her Grandparents. You may have heard about Long Beach in some of those rhythm and blues albums all the kids are listening to. In the couple of weeks prior to our departure from Seattle, Rosanna had almost been run over by inattentive drivers a handful of times, so I have been thinking that a REALLY loud horn might do just the trick. So we happened to be at Harbor Freight today, and I was able to score an air horn for $9.99. As I was standing in the aisle in HF, a guy next me said, "Yeah, get that and blast those kids in the cross walk that think they own the road." I looked at him and replied, "I was thinking of the cars that think they own the road."
When we got home I hooked it up using a trickle charger and a dumbbell as a ground.

Now the trick will be to find a good way to conceal the horns and compressor in such a way that it won't detract from the small moped aesthetic. The compressor itself is slightly bigger than a coke can, more like a Fosters can. I may be able to fit it within the body of a moped.

Gitter dun.

2009-11-18T09:26:00.000-08:00

Let's stop for a moment and agree that "gitter done" is the worst, most inane phrase ever invented by a redneck comedian. It's not funny. IT'S NOT FUNNY!!! People of the world! Put down your KFC bucket and decide to be smarter and more discerning in your comedy choices.

Anyway, rants aside, Phil and I finished the bulk of the moped shed on Monday.

It was during one of the hardest continuous downpours in recent memory, but I was determined to see it through. See the determination on my face?

We put a gutter on the roof so that we wouldn't undermine my neighbors already dilapidated and rotting fence.

The only thing left to do is put a door on one end, wire in some lights and a switch, and put the mopeds back in.

Everybody's working for the weekend.

2009-11-13T18:17:00.000-08:00

When I was in art school, (if Sallie Mae calls for me, the last you heard was that I'm dead), I once did a photo project in which I re-enacted the time that my dad almost cut off his own leg with a skilsaw. During the class critique, my nemesis said, "It's great because you are obviously in a 'construction' costume. Because nobody would ever mistake you for a construction worker." DAMNATION!!! Apparently my good looks and charming nature have outshone my blue-collar roots.

Well, regardless, those winter winds are blowing and if I want to avoid another snow-induced moped shed collapse, I must rebuild it; stronger, larger, and better in every way.

I mentioned in a previous post the UMMU, the unemployed moped mechanics union. Well, again my brother in the union offered to help me with this project and we have been working really hard.

Here is what the old shed looked like:

And here we are on day one of "project shed".

Phil decided to dress as if he were sneaking into a janitors office.

At the end of day one we had accomplished a lot. We had deconstructed the old shed, leveled and set a new floor in, rebuilt much of the rafters, and painted the wall panels.

Today, day two, we continued in earnest. We framed up and installed all the walls:

...and we installed the rafters.

At the end of the day I really had to force myself to stop. We are so close to being done but if I continued I would have burnt myself out. Soon though, my moped shed will be done, beautiful and keep little mopeds away from the rust devil.

In the next couple of weeks, Rosanna and I will be leaving for Palm Springs to work at PSIFF. I just got word from a little bird that there might be a moped trip in Joshua Tree. I'm so excited!

Breaking it down for you:

2009-11-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

So My friend Lailey recently moved to New York and asked me to breakdown her moped so that it could be shipped over there. I thought, "Hey! I could timelapse the entire process and then there would be a video of a moped being completely stripped online. I don't think I've ever seen that before."

So I went to all the effort of setting up my camera and hooking it directly to my computer so I wouldn't have to record onto tape media, etc.

Everything was going great... and then my computer crashed in the middle of it and I lost all but the first 42 seconds.

Oh well, at least I have a short video of the first time I used my workbench and some video of Rosanna printing some business cards.

Enjoy.

Building in buildings can be fun!

2009-10-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

Times are tough, babies.
Unemployment up, cold winter coming, and nothing to do but start fights on the internet. Also, my friend Ian Templeton has left our fair city for Manchester for two years. TWO YEARS! I didn't have the heart to tell him that despite the name, that city will not be the capitol of sizzling hot man chests.

Anyway, last year Rosanna and I moved into Kastle Kvernmo and were delighted to find that with a little bit of effort we could convert the backyard shop into a workable space. Last winter the shop was very cold. It was certainly drier than being outside, but it was not much of an upgrade over the days of yore working on the floor of my very packed garage.

Notice the green tape? That's the "don't put anything other than mopeds here" zone.

Months ago, we started preparing the current shop for the long hard cold. You might recall this short essay on shelves. Well, a couple of weeks ago I insulated the ceiling, had an electrician improve the shop circuit breaker so we wouldn't be blowing fuses, wired in actual light fixtures (no more cheesy clamp-on shop lights!) and changed over from halogen lights to CFLs for efficiency. Phew! (Did I mention that unemployment leaves you with a lot of time on your hands?) But wait that's not all!!!

My fellow brother in the Unemployed Moped Mechanics Union, suggested that I build a work bench in my recently polished work space.

So I spent a while mulling it over and staring at the area that I thought would best accommodate a work bench. I came up with these criteria:
1. It would have to be removable somehow because sometimes large things need to be stored in our small shop.
2. It must be integrated into the handbuilt aesthetic because Rosanna has Iron Curtain Press clients visit the shop frequently.
3. I must be able to brace the bike without a kickstand so that I can drop puch engines.

I thought about how other people make use of small spaces and large furniture elements and I thought, "Good Lord! I'll build a Murphy bed work bench... a 'Murphy Bench'!"
Here is a photo of the plans that my dad and I drew up:

And here is the result:

My favorite part is the outlet that I wired in right under the bench for dremel-or-air compressor-or-sawzall-a-moped-in-half delights. Also, I built in some pretty beefy hooks on either side of the front tire area to accommodate tiedowns, sweet. Responsible Jon claims that my Murphy Bench idea will be the toast of the mid-west. I don't believe that the mid-west has internet.

Tune in next time for "how to make a lean-to into a legitimate garage", and "I'M BRETT WALKER! THAT KIT IS SLOW! YOU'LL NEVER GET IT TO RUN FAST!" Au contraire.

Zing!

2009-10-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

Mophoto Fleet

2009-09-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago Rosanna organized a Mosquito Fleet Family Portrait. It had been a long time coming mostly because I was a very hesitant participant. My hesitation was due in part to the amount of work involved- lighting, procuring a backdrop of adequate size, organizing people, etc- but also due to some of my own insecurities. I just didn't want to be responsible for taking my friends photos and then if they sucked have only myself to blame. Like I said, insecurities.

So the day approached and Rosanna and I worked hard to gather all the necessary things; remote flashes, a giant white backdrop, an armature for hanging the backdrop, tripods, tether cable... the day before the big shoot I thought, "Hey the new Mac OS just came out, maybe that would help!"

It didn't.

It made my copy of Aperture stop working thus requiring me to spend another couple of hundred dollars regain the ability to edit photos. But I digress.

The day arrived and the so did the rain clouds. Ian and I sat in my house, playing wii, watching the weather channel and hoping for a break in the weather as my nervousness steadily grew. As people arrived the pressure to get shooting reached the tipping point so we began setting up and breaking down the equipment between rain showers, the expensive deposit I had put down on the rental equipment looming foremost on my mind.

Eventually we moved over to the school across the street where there was an awning of adequate size. We moved through everyone that showed up, getting some really great pictures, some not so great pictures and some happy accidents.

In the end despite my nervousness, people were really kind and complimentary and that means a lot to me. The members of the Mosquito Fleet can disagree with each other and have personality conflicts but when it comes down to it the positive experiences far outnumber the negative ones. Of course I know that there is room for improvement in the photos but that's life.

So that was fun. Speaking of fun, those Barrans sure are goofy. Here is a couple of gif's that I made from photos of the red-headed duo:

Fly safe Latebirds!

2009-09-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

I had a fantastic weekend. FANTASTIC!
My favorite part you ask?
These two:

I spent some time with the Latebirds last winter and Charlie and Shirley are so generous, gracious, and all around cool. I'm so glad that they came and stayed with us this weekend.

We also had a fix-it day!

Natalie got a Moby!

Brendan kept putting flowers in his hair like a sissy.

Scooby gave us a clutch tuning clinic! More about that here.

This is my flash battery. Recognize.

Everyone was working hard.

Except Brendan.

Ian and Allison rock the Hillbilly.

Dishes is leaving us soon.

Natalie on her maiden voyage.

Arianna looked very nice.

How to spend a day less than efficiently.

2009-09-17T21:58:00.000-07:00

Recently Rosanna's engine has been making odd noises and running poorly.
So a couple of days ago, nice guy Phil helped me swap out motors on Rosanna's bike so that I could investigate the noises and fix this engine.

WEDNESDAY
I packed up the engine, threw it on my back, and rode over to 'ol ADD Motorworks and Pinball Amusements. As it turns out, one of the clutch shims was just a little too thick. The circlip that holds the clutch bell tight popped loose and was causing the clutch to rub on the inside of the clutch bell. Here is a picture of the culprit:

Notice the scrape marks that go around the inside of the clutch bell.

Travis told me that he had a selection of clutch shims at his house on Capitol Hill but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to repacking the motor and carrying it another 5 miles on my rigid bike through the rough streets of Seattle. So instead I thought, "Why not just sand down this shim to fit. It's pretty close already, right? right? right? right?" I didn't actually repeat "right" but my memory of that statement echoes ominously.

I filed and sanded that thing for 3 hours. Every time I'd check it, the shim would be a little bit closer but not quite thin enough. Eventually, I decided it was good enough (by which I mean I had had enough) and slapped the clutch assembly back together.

THURSDAY
In an attempt to maximize the usable space in our shop, I built shelves so that Rosanna and I can organize all of the things that were on the floor.

The shop last spring:

The shop today:

I realize that these two photos don't show exactly the same area of the shed but just absorb these images on the level that one is oppressive and dark and the other is light and soothing. At least that's how I feel when I look at them.

Anywho, the point of all this is that while organizing my newly built shelves I found a clutch shim that I must have squirreled away at some point in history. I popped the shim in and voila! It worked much better than the painstakingy sanded one.

The moral of this story?

Don't be lazy/stupid. Even if modifying the part you have seems like less work than finding the correct component, it'll get you in the end.

Now enjoy this amazing scene from The Shining:

This here is seat country... we don't take kindly to crouchers.

2009-07-13T19:36:00.000-07:00

So as I'm sure you've read in other blogs, the mojito fleet went on a little camping trip last week. It was great. There was a little bit of this,

some of this,

a smidge of:

and whatever this was

In the meantime since then, I recovered my seat.

I'm pretty happy with it, I'll do a better job next time when I recover Rosanna's seat, but for a quick crack at upholstery it isn't half bad.

More later. Off to Moped Monday!

Happy Birthday Joel!

2009-06-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

For Joel's birthday, all he wanted was this cake:

If you'll please note, it is a person happily jogging along, happily jogging along, and then puking.

RJ was over the other day when Responsible Jane called asking for some Rock n' Roll Marathon themed puns to put on a cake. RJ was coming up with some real knee-slappers like "If you run in front of a car, you may get tired" or "If you run behind a car, you may get exhausted". Seriously the guy never ends. Jihee and I wondered last night whether he might not be a secret member of that esteemed organization MENSA. He is not. Well this cake was inspired by Joel's favorite idea from the punning session. Travis might not have survived the horror.

Happy Birthday Joel!

love, rosanna

Is there a rule?

2009-06-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

Is there a rule that at the moment you most need to stop, your brake cable will break? (That's phonetically ironic.)

Is there a rule that when you start making enough money to buy moped parts you won't have enough time to work on mopeds?

Is there a rule that youth will always fade, pride comes before the fall, and pretty bikes will one day be scorned as "ratty bikes"?

Is there a rule that a deluge of carburetors will surely bring a dearth of intakes?

What's the deal with that?

Ahhhh... my old friend, unemployment.

2009-06-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

Well, the streak couldn't last forever, and with the closing night of the Seattle International Film Festival, so too my employment came to an end.
Twas the magic hour yesterday, and a couple of handsome fellows joined me at my home for a round of "watch Joel fix his bike".

I have to say, despite the constant abuse that I endure, it sure is nice to have friends around rather than working hermit like in my darkened shed. I think that RJ was a little sad that he didn't get to use his hacksaw, but Travis and Phil's presence really kept me entertained and they helped me determine that I had a pretty massive air leak. So after buttoning everything up and putting in a new gasket, we were ready to roll. I dutifully passed on my mom's wisdom regarding Golden Gardens, "It was a homosexual bathhouse in the 70's", but RJ and Travis could not be deterred. We met some real nice sport bike riders who as Travis put it, "obviously thought we were lame and we obviously thought that they were lame, but everyone was very polite about it."

As rosanna has mentioned there have been some improvements to our fleet recently, rosanna's stabilizator finally kicked the bucket:
So after replacing that guy, she is now the proud rider of properly stabilized forks. Phil claims that he has never broken one of those and I'm about to replace a third so I can only deduce that his riding style has been less balls to the wall than my own.

I seized my stock crank(?), the cheeks froze up on the con rod... I have no idea how or why this happened.
Since it happened mid-festival for me, I had to get that bike back on the road fast. So, in the course of a day, I took apart the 'ol polini engine and slapped a new Treats 70cc reed kit on it.

Notice the JB Weld that is sealing and securing the pulse valve nipple on the intake.

I have to say that the performance is really awesome for how cheap the kit is, and I think that though I may make a few minor changes, this will probably be my torquey daily rider.

More changes to come soon, since I now have nothing but time on my hands.

Public Aesthetics

2009-06-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

I have been informed that Travis Knarpsworth hates my blog header.

Apparently...
-my hair is gross because I hadn't washed myself in 5 days
-I'm all bleary eyed from sleeping on a bus
-the huge beef jerky slab is gross
-Travis hates Matt Smith and his red eyes

stay tuned for a more pleasing header soon. I'm thinking something like this:

or

is an affliction themed moped in the works? only time will tell!

Jankiness all around.

2009-06-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

By Rosanna

Apparently, I am no judge of when a bike has reached the 'too-janky-to-be-ridden' point. I'm like a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water. After Joel's moped had a near apocalyptic fail on Tuesday (making me near apoplectic*) and we had been rescued by the gallant Scooby/Snordes/Knight in Shining White Van, Joel used my moped for a quick errand run. He returned a little, uh, perturbed, saying 'I CAN'T believe you ride that thing every day. It is a rattling death trap'.

*Joel HARD SEIZED A STOCK BIKE (really, the crank locked up) and it didn't really make me apoplectic, I just couldn't resist the verbal play. I have no self-control.

So both wheels need to be tightened, so my stabilizator (fork brace to those not in the know) broke last week and I haven't managed to replace it yet. So my shocks are completely worn out (because it used to belong to a certain somebody who jumped it off every curb in sight). So I have begun to avoid certain roads like the plague they are (the road by gas works is especially scary). Eh, what are you going to do?

I've been saying for weeks, if not months, that it felt like my wheels were a bit wobbly. But does anyone listen? One day, Joel comes home from moped monday and informs me that Michael Mike is of the opinion that my wheels are wobbly and they need to be tightened. O good, I'm glad we got that figured out. But, mopeds around here always seem like fires that need to be put out. Let's just say my wheels have not been a priority.

Also, after re-jetting post-LA rally, my low-end has suffered tremendously. Tuesday night, a new stabilizator was put on the red and gold (I was a stickler and made sure it was painted black before being put on the bike) and then as we were running out the door wednesday morning, Joel raised the needle clip in my carburetor. It felt like I was riding a new bike! It was so stable. It was quite zippy. We even went along Northlake Way (the road by gas works) and it wasn't nearly as heart-attack inducing as it has been recently. Woot! for minor changes that actually make a difference.

In other fun news: the mermaid bike is making surprisingly fast progress. I was resigned to patiently waiting for the parts as funding allowed, but everything is flowing along quite smoothly. I got a 70cc treats kit, basically the alukit with a flat exhaust port. On monday, I port-matched my engine to the kit. All by myself. It was exciting.

Basically I need to get a few misc. parts here and there (shocks, throttle assembly blah blah). I'm working on patterns for my exhaust pipe today. All in all, progress is being made folks.

Well, Joel just announced that we're having a wheel and brake clinic right now, so off I go.

Living the plush life, oh yeah!

2009-06-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

It's been lean times here at Kastle Kvernmo. Despite what you may have heard, unemployment is not the key to wealth and fast mopeds. But times are changing my friends! I have been employed for a whole two months! WHOOOOOO! Call the Ferrari dealership, I'm putting my down payment on my new car!

Hmmmm.... not really. But I did have enough money to purchase some new parts.
Rosanna can hardly contain her glee:

In related news, my friend Brett Walker moved to San Francisco recently. I wish him well and hope he has great success. The bright side of his egress from Ballard, WA is the moped parts I was able to snag from him while he was vulnerable and worried about transporting it all. The resulting plunder I acquired made it possible for me to cobble together another running bike.

Some of you may recognize the forks and rear struts. This is v.3 of "the orange and ______ bike" and I feel that this is the best iteration yet. The Pinto is going to be getting a major overhaul both cosmetically as well as structurally, so you can eagerly look forward to update on that I'm sure. In the meantime, the pinto motor has to think about what it did wrong.

This Orange and Black bike will be getting an Athena 70cc kit put on it as soon as I can get an intake fashioned for it along with some weird 20mm(?) Mikuni knockoff carb that takes Dellorto jets.

That's all for now, more moped improvements on the way!

I think my wife is starting to have an obsession. (by Rosanna)

2009-05-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

When Joel and I first started dating, he was a big stickler about making sure I knew how to fix my own mopeds. He gave me one for my birthday with the stern lecture that he would teach me how to work on the bike, but I needed to do the fixing myself. Ok, alright, I can learn about this, it is interesting. We even took apart and cleaned an e50 for a hot friday night date once.

My first moped was a Foxi GT Sport. It was blue, and in really clean shape but was slower than slow. Seriously slow. The biturbo pipe helped a bit. Apparently Sachs engines are notoriously hard to make fast, I'm sure it has been done, but putting an 80cc Athena kit that Seattle Mopeds had laying around on the Foxi = scary. I don't know, 80cc's just sounded intimidating at the time. I took apart the clutch on the Sachs engine a few times, I think it is a really beautiful clutch. I love the donut shaped wheel thing, and all the wavy springs. I think it is really fun to put everything back together in the proper order. Puch clutches aren't nearly as entertaining or fun to look at in my opinion. And those are the only two clutches I know about, perhaps there are other nice clutches out there too. One day while Joel was poking around on the Foxi he noticed a crack in the frame. Michael Mike texted me and said that if I got the bike down to his shop the next night with the gas tank off he could weld it back together. I thought sweet, we'll just pop the gas tank off and we'll be good to go. Nope. Not that simple. Basically the moped splits in two. That was exciting. Once the bike was apart though, we noticed that the crack ran all the way around the frame except for right where the engine mounts on. Seriously scary that I had been riding around like that for quite some time. After Michael Mike welded everything back together like the amazing person he is, the Foxi was MUCH less shaky. I thought all mopeds were that janky feeling. Guess I was wrong. Aren't we cute?

Then one day, I can't remember why, I started riding Joel's red and gold maxi. And it went 33mph! O what an exhilarating feel it is to gain 4mph! What fun! I had always really liked riding the Foxi, but this was even better. I also really like the handlebars and seat set-up, it fits me really well. I rode the red and gold bike all winter long. It was steady and dependable, but felt like it was too rich. It would bog down, but never fouled on me. Somewhere in there, Joel and I got married, and I stopped being so diligent about working on my own moped. We amicably split up the house chores, he was in charge of transportation (we only ride mopeds or bicycles, so if one of them is faulty it makes life all that more difficult) and I was in charge of the food (I really do like cooking a lot) and we both felt we got the better end of the bargain. Plus, Joel was unemployed and I was running my own business, it was the perfect fit.
Then we went to LA for Flock Yeah 2. I had been prepared for moped apocalypse, because if my moped was too rich in Seattle, surely it would die in the spring heat of LA. I could not have been more wrong. It got off the bus and roared down the street. I think I can probably safely say that bike has never gone so fast as it did in LA. It was truly thrilling. The moped had been SUPER lean all winter long as it turns out, and since the symptoms I was describing sound an awful lot like a rich moped, we hadn't thought to go the other way with the jetting. We got home, jetted up for the cold Seattle air, and the bike now blasts, and by blasts, I mean the bike now goes super fast for a completely stock moped. The only difference is that I have an Estoril pipe. and that, you might say, is the beginning of the end. It has completely rekindled my interest in working on mopeds and that one little detail called the Estoril pipe has totally piqued my curiosity and interest in the two-stroke engine. I find it totally fascinating that just a pipe can make such a huge difference in performance. I'm sure this all sounds somewhat silly, but you have to start somewhere. Even last night, my dad came over and I was telling him all about my new found interest, one might call it obsession, and there happened to be a cylinder head and piston sitting on our kitchen counter. He gave me a step by step demonstration of exactly how it all works and why one would want pedal reeds, and what transfer ports do blah blah. He even went crazy and started explaining the science behind expansion chambers, drawing pictures etc. It was pretty awesome. By the time Joel got home from work around midnight, we were looking at the wikipedia article aboutexpansion chambers, so there the three of us sat on our small couch crouched over the computer screen watching this cool animation:
What does all this have to do with anything? Well, I'm building a bike. It will take some time because, as you might have gathered if you've read other posts on this blog, we're on a bit of a limited budget due to the fact that we don't seem to follow the traditional routes of employment, but I am super excited. To remain on track, we drew a diagram:

a) to help us budget as the project progresses b) we like drawing pictures.
My goals for this bike are of course, speed, but I want lots of torque. I want this bike to charge up hills like nobody's business and be really fast off the line. In a city with hills, those are, to me, necessities. What good is it if the bike can go 60mph, but it takes you half a mile to get to 60? I will have stopped at two or three red lights by then. Annoying. I'm enjoying asking questions of whomever will answer about what sort of pipe, what sort of carb etc. to achieve these performance goals. haha. And in case you didn't notice, the main distinguishing factor of this bike will be the mermaids painted on the sides of the tank. It is going to be amazing.

Blog updates... 2 in 1 day!

2009-05-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Like any anal retentive compu-nerd. I hate two things:
1) When people shorten "anal retentive" to "Anal"
2) When blog people scold you about updating your blog despite their own blogging inadequacies.

The things I love, you ask?
1) the satisfied feeling one gets after making ther web presence nerdier or "better"
2) Bloggin' in my helmet.

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Uh Oh Travis...

2009-05-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Travis better get that Top Tank Hobbit on the road so he can earn some bragging rights. There has been a lot of talk lately about top tank hobbits on the MA forums. So far they all seem to look like half ass attempts to slap a top-tank onto a hobbit frame and none of them have the really proper finished look and style of a ground-up build. Travis has been slaving away, really taking his time to produce a beautiful and well running "magnum-esque hobbit".

And then today pictures surfaced of a hobbit with a top tank at the Motion Left moped rally this last weekend. Which brings me to the title of this post. Uh oh Travis. Looks like someone out there is actually stepping up the level of detail in the "Magnobbit" competition.

As I see it, Travis has two advantages in this battle,
1) He strove for hobbit accuracy and painted the whole thing as close to stock as possible. When you look at his bike you have to take a double take to figure out if it is some freak one off Honda product.

2) This other hobbit has a seat on it that says three things, "I bought this from Treats", "It's supposed to go on a 103", "I painted my bike to match the seat."

Ding ding

In the first Magnobbit head-to-head match I pronounce Travis the winner based on originality, detail and accuracy of colors.

Let this be a lesson to us all, the Magnobbits are coming!

Fixing Fixing Fixing

2009-05-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

As often happens here at Castle Kvernmo, we have recently run into a veritable moped apocalypse. A steady trickle of things breaking, bending, and rattling off has rendered all of my bikes unridable. (Oddly enough Rosanna's bike is still running strong with nary a flaw.) As I am currently one of the elite persons rich in time and poor in finances, I had to get a bit creative with my moped fixing approach.

First up, the Hercules. This bike is usually a fairly rock solid bike but lately has been showing the results of my daily abuse. I recently noticed that the brake pull rod was bending.

Here's a picture of the poor guy:

As you can see, the rod has been bent due to two things,
1. My vigorous and often excessive use of the rear brake
2. The lack of a proper pivot piece in the brake arm.

When the brake is pulled the rod needs to stay in a straight line and still allow the brake arm to pivot independently. The pivot piece was never on the brake plate when I bought the bike so I just went without. As you can see, it wasn't a good idea.

So, it's time to make a new piece. The proper way to do it would be to machine something out of aluminum. However, I'm trying to fix it now, not later, so I improvised. After putting around my shop for a while I found a section of brake line that had come out of my doomed Chevy van. It's sort of thick metal and I decided it was worth a shot. So I dremeled the ends and drilled a hole, and voila! a new pivot.

Before:

After:

I also worked on the Pinto a bit and got the cdi to work with lights and a horn! Check out the video for more on that...

Janky fixes from Joel Kvernmo on Vimeo.

Also, apparently I broke my stabilizator.

Keys.

2009-04-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

Man I wish that mopeds required keys right about now. I was idly looking at Honda VFRs on ebay today and found this product. It's a viking skull mounted to a key blank for a honda VFR. It's really awesome. I imagine myself walking out of a bar, pulling out my viking skull key, and burning rubber into the distance while the sword I have mounted on the back of the bike drags and causes sparks to fly.

Obviously the sword dragging would merely sharpen the weapon. Do you think I'm some sort of idiot and would ruin my sword or something? Duh.

Here is the key in use:

Failure failure failure...

2009-04-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

I find myself often ignoring the idea that a stock moped is a dependable moped and a souped (suped?) up moped is likely to be faster but exponentially more likely to break. Why do I do this? Because I'm an idiot that's why. Get off my back, what have you done lately?

Since slapping the Pinto together I have had moments of glory within ages of pure chagrin. Lately, the quest for glory has been to install the new cdi that treats has recently come out with. So far I have spent about a week dicking around on it, timing it, trying various cdi controllers, installing a proper kill switch, etc. I have managed to get it running, however, the incredible performance increase that I was hoping for has actually manifested itself as a mediocre performance decrease. I get about 5-8mph less top speed than I did before and my low end is worse. Hmmm.... I don't think that the fault lies within the unit itself, I suspect that I'm probably doing something wrong and have lately been considering a full breakdown and build up of this bike from scratch.

One major performance issue has been a top speed surging. When I hit the top of my power, rather than it just sort of hanging out there, the bike surges and loses power until I lay off on the throttle a little bit. It was exhibiting this same issue in L.A. and I thought that it was perhaps an issue with the Tillotson carburetor. However, Michael Mike, the mechanic whose example I usually follow, has not seen this problem in the nearly identical setup that he built so now I search for the root of the issue.

A) Fuel Flow
Perhaps I am just not pushing enough fuel through my carb. My petcock is fairly janky and so maybe when I hit the top speed I'm simply not getting enough fuel pushed through the carb. I had a little fuel pump kicking around my shop so last night I thought I'd throw it in there and see if anything improved. I tied it in to the pumper line on the bike and also tied in the fuel line and it didn't seem to effect anything negatively... until this morning when I couldn't start the bike at all. I suspect that over night the carb drained dry and now I need to prime the carb prior to starting it so that I have some suction. Lame. The problem is that I couldn't prime the carb and start it in place because I munched my pedal chain tensioner and had no pedal chain. The fuel pump also didn't seem to effect the surging issue so for now I'm thinking it may not be the fuel flow. Unless it's the petcock that is causing issues...

B) Dented up header on the pipe
My pipe is in pretty bad shape. Not so horrible that it won't run, but it certainly isn't helping things.

C) Seized up blued up kit
My 64cc polini has treated me pretty well if you don't consider the three times it's near-cataclysmically exploded on me. I've replaced the piston once, and the rings twice. It CAN go fast sometimes, but I feel like when you are making fine adjustments on a every other piece of equipment and the main hunk of metal that produces the power looks like it's been chewed by truckasaurus... it might be time to throw in the towel on ol' polini power and buy a cheap kit that I can hack on. "Rosanna, I need to buy a new kit. Do we really need to eat this month?" Probably will not happen for a while.

I think my issues come down to this truth that Responsible Jon so eloquently stated, "Kitted mopeds are only reliable if you are willing to replace EVERYTHING. Even the things that are sort of still working." Essentially, if I want to continue using this crap bucket as a daily rider, I'm going to need set it aside, ride my stockers to work and back and spend time and money slowly on the super bike, taking my time to figure things out instead of plugging the sieve holes one at a time.

I'll illustrate this post with photos of my blued up parts later.

Escape from LA

2009-04-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

"The three of us were still sitting there, talking aimlessly, when the patrol car suddenly jumped backward, made a tight circle in the parking lot and zoomed off down the highway. I quickly finished my beer and was packing up my tape recorder when there was a tremendous sound all around us. Seconds later, a phalanx of motorcycles came roaring over the hill from the west. Both Gut and Buzzard rushed toward the highway, waving and shouting happily. The road was dense with bikes. The hot dog stand was on the crest of a hill above Bass Lake; it was the last geographic barrier between the Angels and their destination. The police, in their wisdom, had managed to pile up at least a hundred bikes at the roadblock-where the restraining orders were ceremoniously handed out-and then release them all at once. So instead of arriving in quiet knots, the outlaws crested the hill in a great body... howling, hooting, waving bandanas and presenting the citizens with a really terrifying spectacle."
-Hunter S. Thompson "Hell's Angels"

Well it wasn't quite Hell's Angels, and I really hate how journalists automatically compare moped club to them, however, this was certainly the most lawless moped rally I've ever experienced.

On Friday night, after blasting the pack I realized that I had missed a turn. Upon turning around and catching up with the slow pack, I pushed my way to the front along with Carl from the Latebirds. As we pushed up, we realized that the large white SUV was talking to us, "Pull over to the side of the road RIGHT NOW!!!" Naturally, Carl and I looked at each other and knowing full well that the slow bikes would serve as sacrificial lambs, we rode as fast as we could away from the scene. Six or seven other bikes seemed to have the same idea and Carl and I rode through side roads and alleys until we returned to the warehouse. Later, after being assured that the large group was at a bar near by, I struck out on my own. It wasn't long though, until LAPD found me and pulled me over. I don't have a license plate and forgot to turn my tail flasher on so I suppose I was a bit conspicuous. I played ignorant and after learning that I didn't have any priors, I wasn't drunk, and I was from a small fishing village in the north-country called Seattle, they let me go telling me that I was not going to get a ticket, however I was not street legal and that they were aware of the moped presence in LA this weekend.

Over the rest of the weekend there were intermittent police interactions, the one in particular, that made me think of the above Hunter S. Thompson quote, was somewhere near Glendale, we had ridden for about an hour or so, and we were about to ride Angel's Crest. What is Angel's Crest you ask? I wish I could tell you. I heard that it was going to be AMAZING but as we fired up our bikes and were moments from pulling out, word came down that there was a roadblock of forest rangers that had already stopped five bikes. Other than the word "Roadblock" coming into the rally lexicon, that was about as eventful as the Angel's Crest ride got.

The greatest moment in moped-policio interaction came on Sunday night. After a hard day of riding and hanging out, Rosanna and myself and a bunch of other mosquitos were sacking out in the bus when Travis yells, "Oh shit! There is a police helicopter outside and they have Nik and Cam up against the wall at gunpoint!" So I rose sort of Dracula style from my spot in the fron t of the bus and peered outside and indeed there was a full on Rodney King style LAPD assault on a couple of Latebirds. Ok, I suppose technically no one was being assaulted, but there were certainly shotguns pointed at the heads of my friends. Apparently, some smart people who will remain nameless were lighting off fireworks and shooting roman candles at a puddle of gasoline. So after the cops figured out that it was not gun fire but instead fireworks in the ghetto, they told Nik and Cam that they were idiots and then left the neighborhood.

All in all, the rally was the most fun rally I've ever been to. And there are far to many stories to encapsulate in a hundred blog entries.

Thanks Latebirds!

I'm going going back back to Cali Cali...

2009-03-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

YEAH! Flock Yeah 2 is coming up, we're leaving on Wednesday, so my travel prep is coming along swimmingly. I thought that I had prepared my pinto adequately and was riding specifically for tuning on Saturday. Everything was running good, my bike was nice and peppy, I figured that I was pretty much tuned and ready to go... and then, Murphy's Law struck.

Early in the day on my way to a job interview I got pulled over. The cop was friendly enough, he sort of fell in the baffled category, not really knowing what the law was or what he should do with me. I was pulled over for not having a tail light or license plate. I played dumb and ended up with a warning.

Later, after riding all over town, I was just about home when my moped started making the slow wind down sound. Not a sudden wind down like a seize, more like, "oh-no-I'm-going-to-break-down-please-don't-push-me-any-farther-pupupupuhhhhhhh..." So I pushed it home and it turns out that my roller bearing in my crankshaft blew up and threw needle bearings into the cylinder. It didn't really mess up the cylinder or the piston much more than it already was (I've already seized this kit twice), but it did mess up my rings pretty bad. In my down trodden state of mind I yanked the engine off and began putting a stock engine on. Later on though, Brendan convinced me that I should just throw another ring on there, replace the bearing and try to run it. I'll give that a try today and tomorrow and see if I'm taking the Hercules to LA or if Pinto will live again. I really wanted to bring the Pinto so I could show off the tillotson but we'll have to wait and see.

Blued up parts:

In the meantime, here are a couple of videos I made. Fascinating, I'm sure!

Cleaning our tent for LA:

Grinding on the Pinto:

Nuts.

2009-03-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

...and bolts.

If you walk into your local nut and bolt shack, and tell them,

"Hey Bozo, go ahead and get me stainless socket head bolts in these sizes;
4 55mm M5's
4 20mm M6's
8 30mm M6's
4 35mm M6's
5 50mm M6's
8 M5 nuts.
Make it snappy or I'll call your manager and complain about your anti-professionalism."

Do that, and you'll have all the bolts you need for your E50 rebuild.

Also, this site knows what's up.

What do you do with unlimited time and limited funds?

2009-03-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

Try to start an engine sans bike. Duh.

No success yet, perhaps if I clean the carb.

Oh the things I've been doing in my gas fumie (fumey? FUMEE? HOW DO YOU SPELL FUME WITH A Y SOUND?) shop.

2009-03-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

So I thought to myself. I have this General parts bike sitting in the demolished moped shack. I should get it going. since I don't have anything else to do with my day, I tend to attack mopeds trance-like and snap out of the trance when the day is done and I have tranny fluid and grime all over myself.

So, El General, as I now am calling it, has come quite a ways.
Here is what it looked like when I got it.

It was in pretty rough shape.

The first thing I did was to take apart the engine and completely inspect it, clean it, ascertain whether it would need new seals and bearings etcetera.
Everything looked good, I unglazed the clutch, everything spun nicely, and I slapped it back together.

I am constantly amazed at how a moped can be completely trashed but when you crack open the sealed parts- lights, clutch case, electrical, etc.- it all looks immaculate.
I took a razor to the tank and scraped off the old sticker residue with great success, I tore all of the blinkers off, as well as the unnecessary wiring and lights and broken handle bar controls.
These generals had a really complicated wiring system. No thanks.

So I worked on simplifying and cleaning this bike for a while. I pulled the carb apart and compared the stock 12mm slide to the Dellorto 18mm slide. Man, stock bikes are slow.

We'll see how much progress I make on this bike in the next week. I have big plans for it. 80cc big.

More later.

Crazy weather? Friends out of town? Sounds like a fixin' day to me!

2009-03-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

So anyway I attacked my stack of mopeds like a mom shopping for cabbage patch kids. (anyone else around in 1983?)

A month or so ago, I was riding my 2 speed Hercules with Brett Walker down in the International District and I heard a distinctive "PING". The next thing I knew my moped was wobbling a little more than usual. On further inspection I found that my rear wheel was a funny shape and would have to be replaced. Here is what it looked like after 7 spokes broke.

I asked around the internet and Vic from the puddle cutters sent me this beautiful mag wheel. Thanks Vic!

I had a few sprockets to choose from, my Hercules originally came with the huge 50 tooth sprocket on the left and I swapped it out for the 36t in the middle. That sprocket is a little worn out now so my options were either a 44t or a 28t. I went with the 44t and though my top speed will suffer a little bit my low end will now be bangin'.

The best part of the bike is how clean and beautiful it is. There's nothing distracting about it. Other than the mismatching wheels, the cup holder, the Tomos fairing, the color scheme picked out by a color blind person, ad the clear acrylic clutch plate.

I also fixed rosanna's headlight and taillight, disassembled a Sachs 505 engine, and swapped air filters on the Pinto. I'm not sure which air filter looks better, I'll give the Uni some time and see if I like it.
Before:

After:

:UPDATE:
The Tomos fairing broke on the way home from Moped Monday tonight. Looks like the Hercules wants to be "pretty" rather than intentionally hideous. Either that or it's telling me, "Stop riding me or EVERYTHING will break."

Tune in tomorrow when I resurrect a parts bike into a sleeper speed demon.

More success! It's gotta end soon.

2009-03-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

So I rode the Pinto a bit today... I'm getting used to how the carb wants to be treated. It has some interesting quirks, I feel like once the bike is warmed up it pretty much smoothes out but when I first get it started it doesn't want me to dump full throttle on it all at once.

Michael Mike helped me out with a better intake solution and now it should be pretty solid.

It looks a bit frankenstein but I think it's appropriate for the bike.

The one thing I need to look into further is the nipple on the intake. It is a little bit janky because I drilled and tapped it in a less than precise environment. I'll put a little JB weld on it and it should be fine.

Tillotson Carburetor!

2009-03-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

A while ago, Michael Mike mentioned that he was working on putting a carb on a bike that didn't need jets. No jets you say!? So I've been stoked on this idea and have wanted to try it out myself. I have been collecting the necessary parts for the last couple of months, and now that I've done it myself, I'm sure that a determined person could do the whole conversion in a day once they have the carb.

I'll try to explain my process and what I know about the carbs, but bear in mind that I'm a mediocre source of knowledge at best. Tillostson carbs were originally used for things like chain saws, lawnmowers, etc. The main feature of them is that since they are diaphragm carbs, they can be mounted in any position. No float means no dependence on gravity. Eventually, go karts started using them for the same reason.

So I got myself a carb, bought a new gasket kit at the lawnmower store, and rebuilt the carb while riding on the bus!

This guy on an arborists message board did a really good job of showing how to rebuild this carb.

The first problem that had to be solved was the intake mount. Unlike a Dellorto or a Bing, these carbs don't have either spigot or clamp mounts, so we had to make something that would work as a spigot. Luckily, an exhaust flange from a tomos, or puch mounts up pretty much perfectly. So after some cutting, I have two spigots ready to be bolted onto either side of the carb.

I made a couple of gaskets from a beer box and bolted it all together:

Since it's a diaphragm carb I am going to need a pulse line. Since I'm using a 4 petal reed cage, it's going to be super easy. As long as the nipple is tapped below the reeds on the intake I get the same benefit as if I had tapped right into the crankcase.
I bought a 90 degree nipple and drilled and tapped my intake, put a dab of grey goo on the nipple, threaded it in, and then dremeled the excess threads from the inside.

Once that was done I bolted it all together.

Uh oh! Since the carb is mounted forward, the throttle lever wants to be pulled to the rear of the bike. In the future, I am going to mount the carb facing the rear of the bike and this won't be a problem. However, for today, I really wanted this thing running. So I drilled some holes into a piece of sheet metal, and using a throttle cable elbow I was able to get my throttle cable to pull the correct direction. (See my video to see this all in action)

Per Michael Mikes advice, I primed the carb for the first time by loosening all the screws on top of the diaphragm so that the carb would flood with gas a little.

Of course, to my horror, at this point I messed up my throttle cable. The ends became all frayed after I routed it and I was dead in the water. What would moped tuning be unless something miniscule upset the whole process?

I ran to the store and bought a cheap bicycle cable set and using some knarps I was back in business.

Once everything was on, it was pretty much just the simple matter of getting the bike to fire, adjusting the low circuit until it idled, and then riding the bike and twisting on the high circuit until it felt right. Of course it will take some time to get the carb tuned perfect but for now it is certainly ridable. There you have it.

Tillotson Carb mountup from Joel Kvernmo on Vimeo.

Note: I really could not have done this without help. Thanks for the instruction MM.

Current iteration

2009-03-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

So like I said, I got impatient and just wanted to have this thing running. I slapped it all together and here's what I came up with.
The first thing that I did is grind off all the little tabs and things that I wouldn't need. Then I cut off the seat post. I got a little too exuberant and now I'm going to have to add some matrial just below the nose of the seat. All in good time.

Once I got it running I rode it over to ADD Motorworks and had Brad reinforce the motor mounts. I've never heard of this part breaking or seperating from the frame, but I thought, "Well, it could be a potential weak point, might as well give it some more meat."

The carb and intake are a bit janky looking at the moment but I plan on putting a different carb on there anyway. Right now what you are looking at is:
-E50 port-matched to polini 64cc
-Polini 64cc kit
-Polini 4 petal reed cage intake
-Rubber hose from Matt Smith
-18mm Dellorto PHBG
-Polini Air Filter
-Motomatic N8p/N6p? pipe I don't know which model it is, I do know that it seems to sit higher on the Pinto than it did on the maxi so I can lean harder into my left hand turns.

My patented kill switch method. Send me a stem cap and a couple of bucks and I'll make you one too!

Michael Mike helped me make this extra wide pedal shaft. It's not quite wide enough though so I'm still using a bent crank arm on the left side. Its still in the development stage.

Pedaling pedaling endless pedaling...

2009-03-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

When I first got the pinto slapped back together I had some trouble with the carburation and the electrical. My pain is your gain though, here is some video of me pedaling around trying to get it to start (notice the lack of seat... perhaps it was better that I didn't get it to fire up)

Pedal pedal pedal... from Joel Kvernmo on Vimeo

...even more pedaling! from Joel Kvernmo on Vimeo.

False starts, restarts, etc.

2009-03-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

So I am going to build up a JC Penney Pinto. I've always really liked the body style and as I've learned more about moped frames I've realized that tube frames are totally where it's at. Pinto's have a great stiff feel to their ride that really snaps through turns. This is my plan in rough order:
-Tear down the frame and simplify the look of it; cut off the side panel tabs, reposition the high tension coil, rebuild the bottom end, etc.
-Strengthen the motor mount
-Install a Tillotson carb
-Install a CDI unit
-Ride and tune for a while
-Tear down again and paint/or powdercoat

Here is what the Pinto looked like when I started:

Initially I was going to paint first and build the engine off the bike. But when I got home from California it didn't take long for me to get impatient and just cannibalize most of my maxi onto the Pinto.

Thus far I have already torn down and rebuilt the whole bike and strengthened the motor mount.

I will post pictures of the Pinto's current iteration soon.