Two steps forward, four steps back

Awesome wednesday night ride last night.... well not super awesome because I'm still pretty sick, and was being kinda a party pooper, but the puegeot finally made its Wednesday debut and was cooking along pretty well, definitely keeping up with the pack. Its really hard to get a feel for how fast this bike is because it is so quiet and doesn't really rev out or have the raw torque i'm used to from my maxi. The engine is eerily quiet at full speed, which is probably somewhere in the upper 30's.

It should have a lot more in it with proper tuning. I'm also not sure what the exhaust port looks like in these things stock, but the way it dies on the top end, i wouldn't be surprised if it was pretty restricted. Seeing as most accounts have them doing about 35 all bone stock, i've probably got a fair bit of tuning to do before its running at full potential.

In other news of awesome, the Sachs is running. I spent about an hour on it yesterday. The spark was weak and intermittent so I poked around a little bit and found that the internal coil unit was way too far away from the flywheel. I popped the flywheel off and used my masking tape trick to get the coils crazy close for maximum magnetic fluxin'. There is no flywheel key in this because i got it from crazy euro kids who dont believe in that sort of thing, so the timing is kindof a guess. There are timing marks on the flywheel but who knows if its in the right place. Either way everything looks really good and its now blasting out a fat blue spark.

True to form for this awesome kit, it fires up halfway through the first kick. Even with a massive air leak due to a missing manifold bolt it popped right to life. For some reason the chain i took off it is way too short... cant imagine how that happened seeing as it should be the same exact gears and motor from 1 speed to 2 speed, but somehow i'm about 7 links short so i decided to go ahead and put the tomos rear sprocket on. At first glance these looked compatable, but trying to fit them i found the tomos mounting bolt holes are a smaller diameter pattern- crap!

Since this is a fairly important part, i dont really want to fudge it so i think i'm going to rotate the sprocket 90 degrees and drill a whole new bolt pattern using the indexing table on the mill. I might also upgrade to a slightly larger bolt (maybe SAE rather than metric) because the little cast nubs inside the hub that are supposed to hold the nut when you tighten the bolt are all ground off from having changed this sprocket many times. All they do now is prevent the use of a socket wrench to hold them.

Either way, a productive day. Not sure if i'll have time to get both the puegeot dialed in (including switching out handlebars) and finish buttoning up the sachs all in one day before Saltyfest this weekend, but it looks like this chain/sprocket thing is going to dick me... oh well, looks like i'm moving the release date on the sachs back to bombourbon run. That will give me time to design/build the ultra-luxo-cruiser long seat and modular luggage system i've been fantasizing.