Adventures in air leaks: Exploring 100cc's

A little while back my bike began running like total garbage. MAJOR air leaks. Since it has been steadily getting colder and colder, I sort of put the problem on the shelf. I wanted to open up the engine this winter anyway to see what sorts of improvements can be made. INSERT: lighting coil here.

Tonight I scratched the surface of a magical land. I thought I'd share my discoveries here.


Our journey begins with the Port of Simonini. This holy land is treacherous and is fill with many ports spanning the cylinder.


BEHOLD! The spectacle of ports!









Peer further into the inner cylinder with this port map as your guide






Next we cross the expanse separated from the Port of Simonini and head to Transfer Town. Scientists have many theories as to why the transfers of Transfer Town and the Ports of it's neighbor line up so perfectly. They explain this phenomenon as case matching pangea.




BEHOLD! The awe that is Transfer Town!


Next we head to Coil and Case Caverns! COMING SOON!

Simo dirt bike

1977 mopeds went to a huge conference in Europe and came back with some awesome photos. These in particular caught my eye...


In case you didn't notice, it's got the same simo engine that I have on it.

I know that these are already posted on their blog, but its just too cool not to post up here as well. I don't think I'd ever really go for the dirtbike style but I still think its pretty awesome.

Even More Simonini Ridiculousness

So somehow I now own not one simonini side intake...But two.


The kicker is that I have no project that involves this intake anywhere in sight...it gets added to the project pile with the 90cc simo and matching calibratta pipe...

Someday...

WTF points replacement

So I stumbled on this at the vespa-ciao.nl site. They were selling this strange points replacement unit.

Seems super elementary.











Just mounts where the points were.


In this video you can see the box through the window in the flywheel. Seems to be running nicely. Super interested in figure out A)what this is exactly and B)getting one.

The end of an era...

I sold my sparkly red maxi this weekend. I'm "puch-less" and fully committed to vespa. I really hadn't ridden my maxi in some time, but still had it around as a back up. After I sold it I got sort of sentimental and looked up old photos. Here's after bringing home my first moped.

This was the day after picking up my bike. My car had died for the final time and I decided to do something different; something that I had to fix because I couldn't get it repaired anywhere else; something I could get my hands dirty with.

I'm soooo dorky in this photo and have come a long way in regards to moped mechanic knowledge and intuition.







After I got hit by a car, the bandits rescued me. We picked up my mangled bike, salvaged and scavenged parts to make a red maxi.





Now it's "Italy or Die!"
With my Italian brand of choice being the Vespa.
More to come on that soon...

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...