Happenings

Making things work when you don't have a welder and you're alone at the garage...my leovince pipe wasn't mounting as easily anymore for some reason. It just wouldn't sit flush into the exhaust port. So I took an old seat post that fit into the inner diameter of the pipe and fits snuggly on the outer diameter of the exhaust port.

It works for the most part. I slabbed on a little "right stuff" to seal it up a little bit more after mounting.

Nate Bandit welding up this pipe for a friend. Cheap tools make great braces...

Then he welding up a rear variator for me as my super ciao had destroyed two in a matter of 3 weeks...later I grinded down the welds to fit in the frame.

And then DISASTER!!! While on a ride through the park, I came to a stop sign and heard a strange grinding sound. Worried that it was some sort of engine issue, I looked down but didn't see anything (initially). I took off from the stop and the bike went 5 feet and was SUPER wobbly. it felt as if my bike was made of rubber bands rather than steel. I came to a stop and on further investigation saw that I had cracked my frame. After taking the engine off I realized the extent of my problem...

Thank God I was at a stop when this happened...and that I had a cross bar...otherwise it would have broken completely in half! Going to need to add some steel for stability....Super ciao down!

Under Pressure...UPDATE!!!

So after battling with the vespino on and off for years now, we made some great progress lately. I have been stuck with low compression. No matter what I tried I could not get above 90 psi. I took the bike over to Nate's and being an old hobbit expert he thought of a possible fix. In previous posts you'll see that I plugged the decomp on the head. However the tiny little decomp on the cylinder was still leaking. When we put a drill to it you could hear the little whizz/hiss. We drilled the hole out a little and tapped it with an m5 set screw. After seating the set screw deep I put it all back together and WHAMMO! 180 PSI!!! How's that for a fixed problem! Celebration came momentarily however as it now appears that I have some sort of gas flow issue. Oh well. It had old ass gas in it so that's the next step. Clean up the whole fuel system. What i know is that now I have compression and I have spark. So basically we are ALMOST there. It's the closest the bike has been since creation. Sadly its been a long hard road...but I also don't have much time to put into it with nursing school. Regardless, I'm super stoked.