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...