Dirty bike'n

This one was too good to pass up. Yamaha DT50- $225.


I saw the add on craigslist Monday morning, it had been posted late Sunday night and I figured it was probably gone. I left the tab open and went about my day for 2-3 hours. I couldn't resist, finally I shot the guy an email.


He called me back on the drive home and I explained to him that I wasn't interested in Craigslist BS but I'd come get the bike tomorrow night if he didn't sell it by then. He liked the cut of my jib because he gave me first dibs to go out and pick her up.


Since it was already dark when I picked her up, I wasn't able to do much more than a cursory inspection. Didn't even get to check her out until the next day at lunch time.


Dang, this is a pretty sweet little bike.

So at first look its just a dumb little kids dirt bike. Except that its not little, its full sized, at least moped full sized. About the same size as a TSM, bigger than a Magnum. Probably in line with your average XR100 kinda thing. I had heard of these before but I didn't know much about them, to be honest. I just had seen this thread in MA, which I had ignored. So I went back and checked it out.





It was the comment 'Cool dudes who steal lunch money ride DT.' that sold me on buying the thing.

This is where the magic happens, this little powerplant is the same one yamaha put in the RZ50 and its a balls-out fire breathing 6 speed race motor.

The original color was sky blue, its a shame because its beautiful. Given the general level of jacked-up-ness I'd say it was really well cared for by its original owner. Probably ran great until something minor caused it to be parked. There it sat for awhile until some jerk bought it and decided he didn't like the blue. He proceeded to rattle-can it black, and loose a bunch of the body parts, rubber, and hardware. Someone fairly recently also managed to booger up a bunch of screws. Wreck the head and base gasket by opening it up.

This is the cylinder. Its in really good shape aside from the rust inside. Its a little worn, but nothing unusual. Definitely not been seized or cooked too bad. Even the rings are really nicely broken-in. The whole engine internally appears to be in great shape.

These ports are gorgeous. Seriously, like Terry Dean levels of gorgeousness here. I'm thinking a little bluffing on that bridge, a little port cleanup and maybe raise the exhaust a tiny bit. Its already maxed out on width.

This is the monoshock rear suspension. A battery is supposed to go in here, after some continued discussion on the MA performance thread, a friendly fella is gonna send me the stock airbox and some goodies he's pulling off his bike.

Such a cute miniature cooling system, its just the bare minimum. The burp tank is made out of blow-molded polyethelyene that is ever so slightly thicker than milk jug. 80's jap motorcycle tech was so sparse and efficient.

The thermostat was missing and lots of the outer gaskets and phillips head screws were good'n trashed. Lots of black RTV silicone all over everything. Even if the previous mechanics (to use the term loosely) were able to get this to fire, it must not have ran very well at all without the thermostat in there. 

The head gasket is toast. That is the primary reason for no compression. Someone obviously took it apart, didn't replace it.

I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could!

From the moment you cross the border, rolling west on I-10 into Texas, you know things are different here. Crossing the border the first sign you see is for exit 878.

As in, 878 miles from this exit to the next state line, wherever that is. Over a day's drive away.

It might not register immediately but to see a number like that on an exit sign strikes you as odd before you notice the giant American flags waving, the increase in industrial activity and the fact that everyone has suddenly started passing you at 80 mph.

Texas is certainly a different country. We crossed into Texas on the 5th of December with the family minivan full of Caitlin, Lyle and Myself, and my dad close behind driving a very overloaded and underpowered 26' box truck, towing my F100 behind. It took about two days pushing hard from North Carolina to get to Austin. After moving just over a year ago from Wisconsin to NC, I was prepared for the sucky-ness of moving cross country with an entire house full of junk and more shop stuff than any reasonable person would bother moving across town.

Nonetheless, I got rid of lots of stuff once again, packed for a whole week prior to moving, and thought that I was hedging myself against repeating the mistakes I made last year. Only to find out, there are so many new and terrible mistakes to discover. No way around it, moving across country sucks sucks sucks. The hardest part was probably getting rid of the project cars I had acquired in NC. My escorts, both of them, had to get sold at a hefty loss. Then the Subaru had to go... this was the tough one. The short version of the story is that I ran around trying to get rid of this thing for a whole week prior to leaving, Finally coming down to $1000 and nobody would buy it... they aren't popular cars in NC especially with rust and 250k miles... Finally I threw in the towel and parked it at my co-worker's house and told him to sell it if he could (just heard from him that his wife got in a bad car accident and now he can use the car and is going to pay me for it, so it all worked out in the end).

Either way, sometimes, when you're as dense as I am, you have to learn things the hard way. In this case the REALLY hard way.  I spent god-knows-how-much on my red escort rebuilding the engine, only to never hear it start and sell it for 300 (100 less than i paid for it) and I spent a very long hard night on the Subaru replacing head gaskets and sealing the transmission leaks (and 3-400 bucks) only to have it be 'worthless' and sell it for 1000 less than i paid for it, after investing over $4000 in the car over a 2 year period.

The lesson to be learned here is this: don't throw money into a car you don't plan on keeping. Even if i had scrapped the Subaru when the tranny started leaking, i would have been miles ahead. I got attached to it, because it was/is a good little car with a lot of life left in it, but that clouded my judgement. Same thing with the Escort... never should have bought it, never should have put the money into it.

The bigger lesson is to prioritize those things that you think are important and that make you happy. I wasted way more time than money on cars this last year thinking i'd get rich off them, then thinking that i had to recoup what i had wasted and throw good money after bad. In the end, the best purchase I made was my truck, every minute of working on it has been enjoyable and I know that i'll be keeping it forever so it is worth making it the way i want it.  Get rid of the stuff you don't care about before it drags you down. I moved 14 bikes to Texas, and now i'm spending 200 bucks a month for a storage unit to keep them. Several of them I no longer have any attachment to. I'm still telling myself that i just 'have to get them running' and i can sell them for more money, instead of focusing that time on my son, family and projects that I do care about. Stupid.

So why am I writing all this? I'm not sure, as a reminder perhaps. Something for posterity. I'm getting back into the blog thing again. North Carolina was like mental hibernation for me, my job was dead-end and depressing, my life was stressful (partly because of these stupid projects) and we had no friends (except for Chris who moved after a couple months) I stopped the blog because I stopped doing work I was proud of, because I wasn't mentally creative or socially fulfilled.

Coming to Austin has been an awakening. We have friends already here. I got to spend a night with ACR, most of who I had never met, and it was like getting together with new-old friends. Lester and Austin mopeds is fantastic, and my new job is great. All my stuff is finally together under one roof so I can get work done when i do have free time, and I'm more excited than ever for a couple big projects that are coming together.

The Truck- is my 1968 Ford F-100. Its fantastic. I was calling it 'Buck' after my dead granddad who had the same truck, but the more I drive her, the more I'm convinced she's named Caroline. 1968 is OLD compared to what i'm used to working on. Its shocking to think that this truck was made the year we landed on the moon... or was that 69? I dunno... either way same time frame, these guys at ford couldn't figure out how to make an electrical connector and dudes were getting blasted across the universe by NASA. Anyhow, the 'build thread' is on a forum for '67-'72 "bumpside" ford trucks here: http://fordification.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=71650































THE new 'shop' is a 10x25' storage unit a couple miles from my house. It costs $200 a month, which is outrageous but there isn't much else available in Austin. We're living in a 6 month lease apartment right now and trying to get into a house with a garage but the Austin housing market is bonkers. The population growth is staggering here and I really feel bad for the folks who have been here 20 years or more, who've seen the tech boom (IBM, Dell, Intel, Texas Instruments, National Instruments, AMD and a bunch more tech companies that blew up in the last 20 years are located here) completely decimate what was a nice small town and turn it into a raging metropolis.

Its hard to explain to folks who haven't seen the growth in Texas firsthand, but its basically like everyone from chicago moved to Madison over a 10 year period. And since most of the jobs here are good, engineer-type jobs, everyone has crazy money laying around. Plus a lot of the folks have moved from places like california and made millions selling their homes there, and can afford to buy anything they want.

That leaves regular middle-class folks like us out in the cold. The only affordable neighborhoods are kinda rough, and even what would be nice little average middle class neighborhoods have seen property values skyrocket. 1800 bucks a month rent for a 2 bedroom house is not uncommon. Even small and average sized houses are renting for well over $2k a month in nicer neighborhoods... bummer.



The Peugeot TSM project is really just getting fun. I spent an entire saturday piecing it together out of boxes and trips to the hardware store. I always said I'd only get a TSM if i got it cheap and if it was ratty enough that I didn't feel bad about chopping it up.



This is how she came to me: (nothing is bolted down, just kinda sitting there)

After a day of reassembling the bike with Lyle.

Well, thats what happened. I think i gave the guy like 200 bucks for it or something, might have been 150. He started the 'restoration' and did a lot of the grunt work... it had been used as a dirtbike so I certainly appreciate him cleaning it up and painting the frame (rattle can but very well done) everything else was in boxes and lots of random hardware was missing, plus dumb stuff just mis-assembled. Either way its getting a Doppler 50 kit and i'm doing something cool with the pipe.

Yep, that's a dirtbike pipe. From the measurements I've made (really sloppy) its short and fat. Its also made so much better than anything on the moped market. Its going to mount really easy, I have to do some cutting apart and re-welding, but really minor compared to what i thought i was going to have to do.

The best part is that its going to swing with the engine so it should be pretty sturdy. My goal was to have the only joint be exactly where the engine pivots so it only articulates a couple degrees. That is exactly what will happen, plus the pipe will be mounted in like 4 different places, and its made really well, so it shouldn't break.

BUT WAIT THATS NOT ALL! Holy crap there is tons of ground clearance under this guy. Like miles, i can totally roll curbs, ditches, sidewalks. It was really killing me thinking that i'd have to loose clearance running a big french pipe, but this should have plenty.


Cool cool, i'm also building a MERA 80 to go on my general... maybe more on that this weekend if i can get it all together.

How to Hack'n'Weld

This should be short but sweet, most of you who have been around mopeds for awhile already know this so you can skip this one and tune in to the next post. If you're a newbie or have limited fabrication skills, you may find yourself needing this. People on the forums and elsewhere will tell you that for your Sachs, Batavus, Kriedler, etc you need to 'hack and weld' a pipe, its not exactly rocket science but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The right way leaves you with a nice finished pipe that fits and flows well and the wrong way leaves you with broken cylinder studs, poopey welds that leak, grease and black smut all over your pipe, or a exhaust gasket air leak.

What we're gonna do here, basically, is take the header of a pipe from a stock bike and weld it to the chamber or muffler from another bike. In this case, I'm just modifying a stock M56 exhaust to fit on the M48/56 hybrid motor that you can put together with the MopedFactory batavus cylinder shim. (Treats/1977). For this example I'm only using a stock M56 exhaust, the stock m48 muffler would work, but the M56 muffler works too, and I dont need to chop up 2 exhausts for no reason. This would be the same application you might want to use if you are going to put a 2hp cylinder on a magnum and keep the stock pipe.

If you want to use an aftermarket pipe, you will have to buy one. It always helps to get a pipe that mounts on the same side, in roughly the same place. When you are doing this sort of thing, you want the header length and diameter to be close to the same as the un-molested performance exhaust you are using. You also want to try to use the stock mounting bracket as much as possible because it is probably a lot stronger than whatever crazy crap you're going to make out of zip ties and hose clamps. So figure that out first.

Once you have your donor pipe in hand, and you've figured out how you're going to mount it, you can cut the header off the donor pipe. You'll want to have a pretty good idea at this point of how the two pipes are going to come together. If you can get your header on there and let both pipes clear that's great, if you cant, just cut them off so they have as much extra as possible. If you are trying to save the header off the donor pipe or the muffler off the stock pipe, think about that too. Sometimes you'll get lucky and have one pipe that can fit into the other one in some place, like a A35 tecno estoril which as a big section in the header... say you want to put that on an A55, you can cut off at the big section and weld the smaller A55 header into it or something like that.

If you can cut one pipe off in such a way that you leave a ton of overlap between the two, that's the best. You can then line them up with both pipes in place, holding them side to side of each other, and look along the curves to see where the two line up fairly close.

Now this is where you want to get impatient and whack the thing off where you see it. You gotta take your time and go slow, first tape off where you want the cut to be. When you tape it, the tape will line up and make an even planar cut, as in, it will all be in the same plane instead of some wacky stuff. When you get the first pipe taped, cut it carefully along the tape line. I prefer an angle grinder with cutoff wheel because you can follow the tape more accurately. Using a saw to cut straight through is harder because you have to pay attention to two cutting zones at the same time.

Once you have one side cut, you can start working on the other side. This is where the tape is really nice, you can put it on and take it off a couple times to get the angle just perfecto to line up. Move the pipes back and forth, side to side and up and down from each other and look past the cut one to make sure the tape line is in the right place so the angles match perfect. When you cut the other one leave, maybe, 1/8-1/4 of an inch extra all around the tape line. Sometimes I will take and draw that gap out with marker and cut the marker line.

You will need that extra material in case the mate isn't perfect. If there is a gap or a high side you will want to mark the high side opposite the gap with 1/2 the thickness of the gap, so when you cut it off its perfect. At this point you should probably switch to a grinding disc, or flap wheel like this one.

If you have a big bench mounted belt sander, those are the best, but if you have one you probably dont need to be reading this. The key being, both sides need to be planar, as in, when you put something flat against them they have a flat surface all around. You cant have any gaps in the seam or your weld will push in and block the flow through your pipe.

It should look like this when you're done:

Once you have a perfect mate, you can clean up the material for a good weld. I don't care how good of a welder you are, especially with this thin stuff, you wont get a good weld if it isn't clean. You've put in this much work so far, so do it right and get a nice result ya dummy!

The flap wheel is your best friend for this kinda thing.

If your mate isn't this good or better, keep at it until you get it right.

At this point, if you have a welder, you can just weld it yourself right in place. If you don't have a welder you have a few options:

A) Mark the weld with lines across the weld, the lines will line it up when you take it to a shop to have them weld it, and you will know the orientation of the two pipes. Before you take off, make sure that when you hold them together and line the lines up, you can tell where it is supposed to be. If you are doing a slip fit where one tube goes inside the other, draw the mating line around the edge of the big tube on to the small tube, and some cross lines too.

B) Put a rubber clamp over the two and ride it to the shop and have them weld it in place.

C) Drive it to the shop in the back of your car or truck.

C is probably your best bet, as you are sure to get it right the first time. If you do A, you might want to have them tack weld it and take it back home to test fit before finish welding.

If you take it to a shop they will probably know to do this, but if they dont, ask them to.

If you weld it yourself:

First tack weld the pipe in place on the bike. Be careful not to light your bike on fire, i've seen it happen to a beautiful mint condition white Cimatti city bike and it was heartbreaking. The guy who did the welding was a friend, and the guy who owned the bike was a friend and it was like 'sorry i started your bike on fire dude' ... awkward.

So yeah, tack it, less chance of you starting your bike on fire. Use wet cardboard all over the place to keep sparks from going into the carb or whatever. Keep a fire extinguisher handy. Dont be stupid.

Yep. Tack welded.

Now you can take it off your bike and its a lot easier to hold and manuever so you can seam weld it.

Start of the seam welding, looking good so far. Its probably the easiest to do it in 3-4 small passes.

Not the prettiest weld ever, but its what's on the inside that counts. Much better to have your weld ugly on the outside and smooth on the inside at this point because once you're done you can grind the outside.

Like this

Dang, that looks nice.

Don't forget to spray paint that. If you have chrome and you want to keep it looking nice you can mask off the ground up area and just paint a band of black or silver hi-temp paint on it. The little band is hardly noticeable.

Looky that there! Batavus with an M56 cylinder on it. What'dya know. In this picture with stock encarwi and stock M56 pipe, she was going about 32-33 mph, with plenty of torque.

Fallin' off the map

If ya didn't hear, I kinda fell off the map at the end of last summer when I took 5 classes to finish my ME degree, got married, went to North Carolina and started a real-life adult job as an engineer. Whew! Its been a crazy last few months, but as my friends and I who write each other letters like to say, 'no guilt in letters' meaning that instead of feeling bad about not getting letters out, or in this case blog postings, just pick up and get on with it.

Moving down here, of course, was a pretty major disruption to all sorts of projects. Moped Factory went into hiatus for a few months while I restructured into a more 'hands-off' and hopefully more sustainable format. My brother Noel is now facilitating manufacturing in Milwaukee where my friends, the machinists who were letting me make parts in their shop, are making the machined heads. Its been a little difficult for me to give up the reins, partially because I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to Q.C. and partially because so much of what I was doing was just stuff I knew but couldn't really teach someone. The other thing I realized pretty quickly is that the last two years I've basically been working for next to nothing, and oddly enough, nobody else wants to work that hard for no money.

The bad news is so much stuff is out of stock and its been really hard to get it made, but the good news is that we're moving towards a more sustainable and hopefully predictable manufacturing strategy. A lot of parts are going up in price because the people making them have to get paid more than I was, but thats just the way it works, if you don't like it, buy your custom engineered high performance moped parts from someone else who is willing to work for free. I still don't make any profit and loose a lot of money compared to my real job, which is now a lot more lucrative, but I do it all for the twisty-spitties, so whatever.

In other moped business news, I bought out a moped/scooter dealership barely a month after moving down here. I ended up with a huge storage unit full of scooter junk and take-off/used moped parts. The high dollar scooter stuff is going through ebay, its nothing anybody in mopeds is interested in and I need the money to fund some mopedfactory R+D so I'm gonna try to get top dollar. Plus its a pain in the butt to store and get rid of this crap, so I gots'ta get paid.

Liquid cooled Kymco Super 9 cylinder... who wants to put this on something cool? 

The best thing to come of all this is the huge stash of 'on hand' scooter parts i have for modding, hacking, and adapting to mopeds. I have about 20 stators and 50 cdi boxes that i'm testing for moped applications. One of the first projects, that will probably end up as a marketable product, is a modern scooter flywheel and stator adapted to moped use. These seem to be pretty reliable, dirt cheap, and they will get you mega power 12v lights and CDI. Some of the DC boxes I'm hoping to adapt for total-loss racing ignitions.

It took me about 2 seconds to realize that a very cheap, very common stator brand is a direct fit to a bosch flywheel, so i plan to have the first one of these sparking- if not running- in a couple weeks.

Speaking of running things, the biggest impediment to that lately has been my terrible garage situation. When we moved down here we quickly found garages are slim pickin's in this part of the country. Everyone has car ports except for crappy townhomes, and i don't get along very well with the kind of people who usually live around me in town homes.

We found a really nice little house in the college neighborhood, but the garage is in a pretty sorry state. It doesn't have a door yet, has a dirt floor, and no power/lights/anything. When I went to hang a door I realized the whole thing was literally one sturdy shove from falling over. The foundation was disintegrated and the wood around the base was heavily termite damaged. The footer boards along about 1/3 of the base of the garage are completely gone.

I've begun the frustrating (especially considering everything else going on right now) task of re-building the brick foundation in small pieces. Jacking the garage up with a floor jack, butressing it with boards, rebuilding the foundation in situ, and setting it back down on the replaced part of foundation. When i'm done with that I'll be hanging doors, putting down a 'floor' probably made out of craigslist used paving blocks, and building out my workbenches... gosh that's gonna be a lot of work.

So that, more or less, brings us up to speed. All my mopeds are in storage, half my tools, all my parts and a whole second storage unit full of dumb scooter parts are scattered within a 1 hour radius of my house. Nonetheless, I've managed to get some projects worked on here and a fairly useful little engine building lab set up in my office. I'll put up posts in the next few days/weeks/months with updates on individual projects and some of the cool non-moped stuff I've been busy with.

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!

Sea-Bee outboard tuning

This one is from the files, I was digging through some old SD cards that were in my desk the other day, making sure i had all the important DATA off them, and I found pictures I thought I'd lost or forgotten to take of my outboard project.

About 2 years ago Caitlin told me her grandpa promised her his old fishing boat at one point in time. Its an ancient 13 foot aluminum thing that has been sitting upside down behind a shed up at his land for the last 10 years since a notable incident where he almost drowned and decided to stop fishing from a boat. He's 90 now, and probably was in his late 70's when he last got in it, and almost never made it back to shore.

Johnson QD - my ideal outboard (from oddjobmotors.com)

I decided that if we were going to be getting this boat I should probably find an old outboard of the same vintage to compliment it. Luckily I live in the home of Ole Evinrude, a few miles from Mercury and within shooting distance of almost every notable outboard manufacturer in America. Craigslist is literally littered with antique outboards in need of a carb cleaning, and most can be had for about scrap prices. Its a shame because I'm sure wisconsinites send dozens of these things to the shredder every day, and they are a real unique part of our manufacturing and sporting history, as well as being some of the most interesting industrial design pieces of the 20th century.

I found a kindred spirit who runs the website Oddjob Motors .A fellow Moped and subaru fan, he has one of the most complete outboard sites on the internet chronicling dozens of beautiful vintage outboards, and his love of them. I was infatuated and probably looked through the entire site getting all excited for a summer of boating. I even emailed the fellow and discussed what to be looking for in a candidate for restoration. I concluded the QD Johnson above would be about perfect, and let a few slip through my fingers that were priced too high ($40+).

Mercury marine were some of the best looking outboards of the day

The Goodyear/Gale SeaBee I thought I was getting

Long story short, I finally settled on a Gale 5 hp, marketed by Goodyear Tire as a 'Sea-Bee.' I bought the engine sight unseen from a friendly guy who offered to deliver it to my work for $15. I gave him a $20 and had him keep the change.

It ended up not being the model I wanted, I was looking for the later model with the transmission, but regardless this one was pretty cool. The styling wasn't my favorite at first but since having rebuilt it, has kinda grown on me in its overly flourished 40's garishness. Obviously they expected this to be going about 80 mph to need such elaborate streamlining!

The 1948 SeaBee as I got her

Cursory inspection revealed that the pull starter, while somewhat operational, was pretty mangled. The tank was still partially full of gas that probably had lead in it. A sealable gas cap was used, presumeably so you could put it in the back of your vista cruiser sideways without gas spilling out, and that cap preserved the incredibly varnished gas for many years. I was soaking the tank with MEK thinking 'this gas is probably older than I am.. crazy.

Obviously the engine would need a thorough cleaning, new gear oil, maybe a seal or two here and there, but by and large looked mostly complete and turned over smoothly.

I thought it was going to be a quick saturday project. I started off puling the tank, starter, flywheel, carb, reeds off the power head. Everything was going along smoothly when I got to the part of pulling out the drain plug to check on the gear oil in the gearbox. The screw was kinda stripped coming out and behind it was a pile of rust dust. damn. That is never a good sign.

Yup, there's the problem.

Turning the propeller by hand in relation to the power unit revealed the source of the dust, what used to be the bevel gears in the gear box. One was half rusted off. Probably a previous owner stripped the plug for the gear case and didn't concern himself with the fact that the engine was sitting with water in the gearbox. Doing that for awhile turned the lower gear (which runs on a horizontal axis and was therefore half submerged) to dissolve the submerged half. Someone surely tried to run it after that and made a mess out of the rest of the gearbox. Totally mangled.

Since drive gears for a 1948 Gale outboard aren't exactly something you drive down to NAPA and pick out of a catalog, I had to start doing some research.  Turns out Gale was making outboards in northern Illinois since world war 2. The engines were marketed through 'brand engineering' at department stores, sporting goods stores, and even Goodyear tire stores (which used to sell a lot of general automotive-type junk). The Good Year store sold the Sea-Bee, Hiawatha was sold by some long deceased sporting goods store, there was another one that came from Montgomery Wards even. With this additional knowledge, I was able to get on Ebay and find some of the more popular brands. A short search turned up a lot of lower unit gearboxes, but only one matched visually to the one I had. Several years of Gale shared similar lower units, but the very early model that I had was a slightly different casting and assembly. I ordered it and paid $25 including shipping from Arizona, crossing my fingers that it would be the right one, and not be trashed in a similar manner.

The new lower unit came a couple weeks later and I set about to adapting it. No propeller and the water pump was a mess, so i was able to keep those. The water pump casting was a little different but enough parts were similar that it could be cobbled. The mounting hardware was different too, a short stud where i had a long stud and a different water pump feed tube. No biggie, that was all adapted as well.

At this point summer '11 was quickly approaching and I was hoping to get something running ASAP to get out on the lakes and rivers around Milwaukee. I was also moving my shop and trying to get the engine finished up before having to pack everything into boxes and risk loosing a bunch of parts. What a mess.

The engine at this point came all the way apart, I was pretty close by having removed everything from the engine and removed the stern drive. It was logical that I continue the process. Plus the inside of the water jacket, from what i could tell, was a complete mess. There was some kinda crummy coating that was peeling off with lots of scale behind it, someone had done some work on the engine at one point in time and bent part of the engine casting leaving it with some sealing issues, and I figured while i was this far along, it would be fun to port the thing out a little bit and see if we couldn't get that '5' hp up a little higher.

I pulled the covers off the engine, no small feat considering the 60 year old gasket goop holding them on! Cleaned everything up with quite a bit of time in the ol' sand blaster. The porting was crossflow, which is the predecessor to loop scavenging and much more suited to low rpm's. Large heavy pistons with scoops on them direct the flow of air from the transfers up and over the piston so it scavenges the chamber, then down out the other side through the exhaust port. Definitely not ideal for performance. I could also tell that the ports were drilled into the casting with a drill bit. Obviously a manufacturing concern, trying to avoid the use of additional cores or tricky machining, but not the best for performance. Since I don't really know anything about porting crossflow engines, I pretty much just went by feel, trying to get a little more exhaust area and get the ports to open a bit earlier. Hopefully my gut feeling isn't too wrong, but i really dont think three crummy drilled holes are magical in any way.

Ported on the right, unported on the left.

I also left the raised area on the casting around the ports. Not sure why this was there, but I think there might be some significance to it, a port without significant length can cause wierd eddy current stuff and I didn't want to risk getting the area too thin around the ports where they could have heat problems.

Final porting. symmetrical? you be the judge.

The flywheel, points and stator plate was all in pretty good shape. Spark plug wires were gone. I found some cool fabric braided spark plug wire and soldered that on the coils, dressed the points and adjusted everything. How did I know what timing to set? It doesn't matter, the engine is goverened largely by adjusting the timing advanced/retarded. This was a pretty common thing back in the days of crappy carburetors that really only ran well at full throttle or no throttle. The carb in this thing was really crummy, one jet and no real metering system other than that.

I had thought about putting a big mikuni on there, but thats just getting silly. I'm not trying to set a record with this, i just want to put around the river and crash condo parties all done up like Huck Finn.

Here is the engine all finished up. There is a shroud that will go over it, but I haven't put that back on yet, still ironing out some bugs.

 

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In the end it should look like this Hiawatha which I photographed at an outboard museum in Sayner, WI.

The patina will be retained on the Sea Bee, I like it looking like something that I dug out of my grandpa's shed and miraculously still works. I think leaving it like that does true justice to the heritage of the machine and the people who designed and built these beautiful things with old school american craftsmanship.


In other news, Leo the 90 year old grandfather-in-law has since decided he doesn't want to part with his boat for now, so it will remain sitting in the weeds in northern wisconsin while my poor engine languishes in Milwaukee with no boat. Oh well, what'cha gonna do?  Fire it up in a 5 gallon bucket and annoy the neighbors? Yes please, I'll try to get a video for you!