Heavy Shreddin'

Fall is here and the weather dropped yesterday causing my bike to go the fastest yet. I realize that I've probably been extremely rich with my jetting (mostly for caution). But with the temperature drop I finally got to taste the potential of this bike. And Holy Crap was it fun.















I just kept pushing it; going harder and harder for longer and longer and the pipe just kept going. At one point I felt the bike strangely surge. I looked down and saw this...(click on the picture for a close up view)

If I'm going to ride this thing as regularly as I have been, I'm going to need some new belts...

a rope, a pulley, a plan

I've been meaning to post this for some time. This was the last issue I had to overcome in order to get my bike ride ready. The simo engine has HUGE compression, but no decomp...leaving one to wonder how the hell to start the thing. I've seen video of euro dudes run starting their bikes (see pink ciao) I couldn't really wrap my head around how this can be done so smoothly. The first time I started my bike (after the whole drill/exploding variator situation), some Bandits helped me use the rear wheel of another bike and ran it up against the variator so that it'd turn the flywheel...It worked, but it was definitely not something I wanted to do at every gas up.

I know that rufus had tried a number of pull starting methods. He had mentioned that he was most successful with a stock ciao pulley. Without seeing pictures (at the time), and with the help of some fellow bandits, we plotted a method using that as inspiration.

What we came up with was to weld the variator nut (final nut that goes on the crankshaft to one side of the pulley. Then we welded a larger nut on the opposite side so that the pulley could be impacted on. The pulley spins with the variator, but is light enough not to make much of a difference. You'll notice that it looks similar to Rufus' set up, except that mine doesn't fly off every time you start the bike...

Frame-tastic Seat Magic

So the seat setup I was running has been failing...miserably. There wasn't really any true support; it was just a hack job mounted to the seat post (on the frame) with some nuts and bolts. While this worked for a while, the seat started to bend the frame due to pressure. when I took the seat off to fix this problem further I discovered this.


Too much stress on the frame...cracks! Thankfully Nate Bandit came to the rescue with a great idea.









First we had to kill this ginormous spider lurking outside the garage.

Seriously it was HUGE. Biggest spider I've ever seen in the U.S. outside of a zoo or pet shop. I know the picture is blurry, but I didn't want to get any closer than this. Apparently its harmless, but still scary.








Next we had to harvest a new tab from an old seat post.

I cut this one off and Nate welded it to the frame to mount in the existing holes on the seat pan.














(I love how this photo came out)









Lastly Nate rigged up a mono-shock from a pocketbike(I think?) to my seat pan...







...with the other end mounted to a steal plate welded to reinforce the cracked frame, I now have a much more reliable and smooth ride.