Summer in full swing!

Woah yeah, so after that last post, I swore I'd start getting posts out every Monday. Usually I do cool things on the weekend so Monday seems like a good time to tell y'all about them. The last couple weeks have been way too busy to blog but I have made some serious progress on a number of fronts:

Black Batty VA:
Finished modifying M56 exhaust to fit on M46 engine with M56 cylinder. Sounds like a mouthfull but I'll be writing this whole project up soon. This has been the test bed for all my crazy M48 performance parts and it hasn't been complete and running since last summer. The M56 cylinder was installed last summer but I haven't had time to weld up the stock muffler until now. This write-up may come in two parts as I took a lot of good pictures to serve as a 'how to hack'n'weld an exhaust pipe' tutorial.

Long story short, the M56 cylinder alone with stock M48 carb, reeds, intake, and stock M56 pipe is good for 32 MPH out of the box. The air filter for this thing also disappeared somewhere in the last few months and so that was 32 mph with me holding the choke closed... pretty impressive!

I wanted a benchmark with all the stock goodies, so now that I have that I'll be putting the moped factory upgrade kit back on with a 12:10 SHA from a Vespa that I happened to have laying around. We'll see how that goes. If it is as fast as I hope, I'm going to sell this sweet 170 mile machine to a lucky collector looking for something pristine and cool lookin'. You really cant beat the classy lines of these early Batavus, but the 20mph stock speed is just too slow to ride comfortably in traffic. This whole M56 setup really makes the bike a practical rider keeping the character and reliability of the stock machine.

I've agreed to take on the Cranks raffle bike for the rally this year, which is a top tank Starflite with some minor cafe' mods. We'll be doing the same things to that one, maybe keeping the M48 cylinder, i'm not sure, and trying to get it fast enough to hang with the big boys. If you come to Milwaukee to the rally, you'll get a chance to ride this bike and feel the pure power of Batavus!

Puch Polini ZA
To say that the polini'd ZA is coming slowly would be an understatement of incredible proportions. It seems like every time I get closer to finishing this thing, I find that there is something else that needs to be done on it, or another part I need to save up to purchase. I was able to get the M7 studs tapped in there but they were too long, and had to get cut down and ground down twice. I chose to do this at the machine shop because I dont have a bench grinder and there is nothing more annoying that bodging the end thread when you are reaching nuts down into the head pockets to install them. Now I need to find hardened M7 nuts which i haven't been able to source anywhere. Even McMaster just has shitty low grade hardware for M7... back to the drawing board on that one.

Peugeot 103
Ach, the poor Pug! It has been getting me to and from work every day now for almost the entire summer. I've completely worn flat the Kenda tire I installed when I bought the bike.  A combination of poverty (impacting my ability to fill my car's gas tank) and a bad voltage regulator that was damn impossible to trouble shoot, has precluded me from driving my daily driver ford escort 'pickup truck edition'. That little Pug has been a reliable little bugger, but 36 mph is just wayyyy too slow. With the help of my friends at Treatland, I've begun work on a new Peugeot exhaust for the 'stock' crowd.  Right now there is just nothing decent on the market for stock ripper 103's. The pipes fall into 1 of three categories: Stock (which is pretty good), Joke pipes (like the Faco and mini circuit) which don't really do much and in many cases are worse than stock, or mondo gigantor loose your pedals and kickstand swivel ball  joint 10,0000000 rpm pipes, which are totally awesome but not well suited to people who just want to get their stock bike going a happy 40 mph.

(sorry no photos yet, I want to get this tested first)

To fill in the massive hole in that market I'm developing a mild circuit pipe. It will be pretty obvious when it comes out that it is just a hacked-up common pipe for a different moped, but the genius (and a lot of R+D) has gone into the hacking, trying to take something that is already well suited to a peugeot layout and powerband, and making it work better by adding a bigger, shorter header (for variator revvin) and making it more compact. Plus I'm trying to create a bracket that will hold up to abuse and keep this thing from cracking. Finally I'm looking into some heat treating that will take this to the next level making it even better than the commercially produced import pipes. That all combined with being precision jig-welded in the good-ol' U S of A will hopefully blow this market wide open.

Oh, and did I mention the pipe is designed to work with both flange and screw mount cylinders?? Yeah, its gonnna be rad.

If anyone feels like they would be interested in testing one of these let me know, prototypes should be out next week. I want at least one person with an airsal or similar 50cc kit, carb of your choice, and one person with a completely untouched stock gurtner bike.

Regular MF production
Its a terrible time to be out of stock on so many MF parts, but I've been hella busy trying to get stuff re-stocked and huge $hipment$ will be going out in the next couple weeks. Good thing 'cause i'm broke!

Made a pile of engine stands, Tomos and Minarelli too!

Hobbit rollers have been selling fast as heck too. I cut up 4, 6 food rods of material over the last two weeks and have literally hundreds of rollers waiting to be assembled. They should be done soon and back in stock as well.

Heads will be coming, I know a lot of them have been out of stock for a long time, but it has been hard for me to come up with cores. I'll be buying up cores soon so email me if you have some you want to sell or trade for other parts. The more heads i can find, the more i can make, thats good for everyone!