Place holder, for now

I wanted to get a post up here just to remind myself what I've been doing the last couple weeks. Maybe kind-of a teaser for now because I promise to fill in all the details, pics, and everything else once i have more time to write.

Sachs:
Been working slow but sure on the sachs, the engine has been together for a couple weeks now but i wanted to powdercoat the intake manifold, previously painted crappily with primer, and sand the clutch discs to see how they would hold up. I've got the whole new clutch drawn up on napkins, and once i find some time i'll be re-designing the pack in solid works. Hoping to be able to put together an 'uberclutch' that outperforms the german one for about $100 us.

 Is this why you had an air leak?

 Engine re-fitted temporarily, nice and shiny p-coat intake manifold! Damn that sexy. Now its just hooking all the cables back up, tuning it, fitting the seat cover, adding buddy pegs, finishing the airbox/airfilter... i guess there is quite a lot to be done yet.


Peugeot:
Finally got the new intake manifold attached. Also modded (lightened) the variator and pulled 3 balls out of the clutch. Woah, what a difference! Unfortunately I cant compare what the carb change did and what the variator change did independantly because i did them at the same time. Due to the peugeot having the 'old style' mounting bracket where the spring rod thingy doesnt come out, installing the engine is a godawful pain in the ass, so i elected to do them both at the same time. The reconditioned SHA is leaking like it has a hole in it, so I ordered some new jets and a new needle and i'll be installing those and finishing the tuning this week. Low end tuning is rich as hell because the air filter has gas dripping out of it... darn.


Bridgestone:
Got the rear hub rebuilt, still have to bend the bent swingarm back into place, and re-fix the clutch, but we are making slow progress.

Mopedfactory:
Working on a few new parts, hobbit subframe braces for racers and heavy dudes, and the sachs clutches mentioned.

yikes! Maybe i'll have time this week to fill in the rest of that, maybe not. whew, sobusynow. Leaving you with a little view of the shop. AMERICA!!!!!!!!

Fixin' yer Subaru exhaust

This is just a quick one but I wanted to write it up somewhere before I forgot.

If you own a Subaru and know the undeserved feeling of superiority that comes with driving around a monster truck that looks like a dumb station wagon, you probably have had or will have your blissful driving experience ruined by a noisy exhaust. Most old cars in general are riddled with exhaust problems (it takes a beating down there piping out highly corrosive mixtures of acidic vapors).

It seems like every Subaru I've owned (3 now) has suffered from the same problem, the whole exhaust holds up pretty well but for some reason these stupid flanges rot out. It probably has something to do with how they are welded or the material of the flange or something like that but you go over a bump and your car gets louder, you smell exhaust and go underneath to find something like this:

So the other day I cut out a handful of flanges and made a couple of these:

Quick, easy, permanent. You cut off the tail pipe with a hack saw, angle grinder, sawzall, sharpened toothbrush whatever. This little guy bolts onto the other flange and clamps on around the tail pipe with a regular exhaust u-clamp thingy. Since every Subaru from the '86 brat i have up to the 2001 outback uses the same flange and same 2" exhaust plumbing, this little dingus is pretty universal.

If you want one send me an email. $35 shipped, cheap! I even shot some paint on the weld and unprotected flange so it wont rust so fast.

I put one on the 2001 outback and it worked great. Still a pain in the ass having to jack the muffler out of the rubber hangars, cut the pipe off, somehow everything moved.... 15 minute repair turns into 3 hours.. but its a hell of a lot easier than the alternative which involves going into the parts store, sifting through a catalog to get the right flange (ordering it and waiting 3 days while your car is up on jacks with no exhaust system), removing the whole exhaust, trying to weld the new flange to the rusty old pipe... blah! And the flanges aren't welded on exactly straight!

The slight bit of slop in the slip-fit coupler takes up enough of the wierdness to get it all together, and it makes a tight seal without needing a welder or having to weld an airtight seam on rusty pipe... tough.

the Bridgestone lives!

Last nights ride was awesome. Yesterday we were in the mid-70's in Milwaukee, with the slightest hint of breeze and a cloudless sky. Basically a perfect day in all regards. I was watching Lyle, so he and I got a lot of work done on the Bridgestone. My goal was to have it running for the ride, Caitlin's folks agreed to babysit so we could go out with the Cranks and celebrate finishing up midterms.

I didn't take good pictures because I was rushing to finish the bike, but I'll snap some better photos and maybe get a ride vid tonight or tomorrow.

I've edited the Bridgestone page to have most of the info up to last weekend, and I'll add the final details as soon as I get some free time.

The ride itself last night was great. It was the first time Caitlin and I have ridden together in over a year, since before she got pregnant, so it was pretty special. The little Bridgestone is going to be a great bike, I can tell already. I got the lights working just as it was getting dark, we hopped on the bike and rolled to fuel. On the way, we had a minor hiccup, Carlos must have removed the bolts from the chain guard and left it sitting in place, I never noticed it wasn't bolted down. If you haven't experienced a chain guard/chain interaction on a motorcycle, you are lucky, its a completely terrifying sound and handling experience. Especially on a tentative first ride about half a mile from home! I pulled the chain guard off and stashed it in a bush to get on the way home.

The rest of the ride was really uneventful. The TMX has a dual rear sprocket, like many enduros of the time. With the amount of power this thing has (really surprising for a 1960's motorcycle- blows any comparable honda out of the water) the short gears are pretty silly. It is revving uncomfortably high at about 40 mph. I'm sure it could rev out higher, but I'm afraid that it is a little lean. The rotary valve induction has the carb sitting in a little box off the crankshaft. The air comes in from the air filter, through plumbing, into that box, and there are about 4 or 5 different plugs to cover up clutch, carb, and oil pump adjustment holes... the cables also come in through a wierd rubber snorkel dingus, and the fact that all this stuff is over 40 years old probably means that it is leaking somewhere. I dont mind the leaks because i'm not driving through mud, dust and water, but I will have to up-jet to compensate for them.

Pretty dissapointingly by the end of the night i could tell that the pressed-in kickstart cog bushing thing was slipping. Carlos, being trained as a machinist, informed me that it was obvious that it was going to slip, and he would have done it differently- thanks buddy hindsight is 20/20, right? I'm a little nervous because when that bushing slips out, the clutch basket pulls forward allows for some misalignment in the gears... not the best situation.

On friday, before frozen snot, i'm going to have to fix it again. I came up with the idea of drilling out a hole on the interface of the two surfaces and jamming a brass pin in there.. I'll probably also knurl the bushing a bit, and use some Loctite Retaining compound (aka bearing glue) in order to give everything a bit more hold.

All in all, i'm really happy with this little bike. Its very well designed in a lot of ways, the 4 down rotary shifter is an awesome idea that more bikes should have- you just keep stomping the gearshift until you get into the right gear. Going from 4th to neutral is accomplished by one click down, and if you do ever have to 'downshift' in a turn, its a lot easier to flick it up once than most bikes where you are constantly wearing out your boot going up and never go down.

I can tell already that the points need some atttention, i'll try to dress them but lately i've been of the opinion that points should just be replaced all the time. Its not worth the headaches they cause. (see Peugeot).


All in all, it was an awesome night.. nights like these remind me why I work so hard to get bikes running and keep them running. Sometimes after a long winter, especially one where you have 5 active projects, and no running bikes, you get lost in the shop time and forget why you're doing it. Being out with my girl, on a bike that I brought back from the dead, and riding with my best friends, is really the whole point isn't it?

That said, with 3 people on motorcycles at moped night, I did feel a bit like we were cheating. I cant wait to be back on a moped again. Motorcycles are cool, but mopeds are still more fun.

Steady Bloggin'

Or not so much.

I just finished compiling the list of  Tech articles I've written. It was good to go back and look at some of that stuff from years ago. Its good for me to see how much I've improved in my understanding of mopeds and engines and such, how much better my shop practices are and see some of the comments I missed.

The only thing that hasn't improved apparently is my actual blog writing. I should be writing more and writing better, taking more pictures, and thinking about my work. Right now I'm working on my senior design project and my project notebook is a big weakness. The original reason I started this blog was to slow down and doccument what I do, hopefully to improve. In some ways I have, in some ways I haven't. Either way to be a good engineer it is critical and now is as good a time to make myself keep notes as any.

Now that I have an exciting new format and its getting to be spring again, I'll be trying harder to make good habits stick and continue to write and document everything I do.

Speaking of, there is a lot of new stuff that can go in the 'Bridgestone' build page from last weekend. I spent a whole day in the machine shop re-machining a little cog thingy that works with the kickstart mechanisim. I'll put up some more pics and try to write up the current state of progress on the 'Bridgestone' page soon.

Moving right along, the Sachs build is progressing incrementally and I'm hoping to have time to pull the Peugeot engine this weekend. Got a motorcycle skills class on Sunday that should be interesting.

Thanks for reading!

out of 'controls'- and were back with a somewhat readable site

Ha haaaaa, I just had to call the post that because I just finished up one of the most brutal classes I've taken for engineering, Electromechanical Control Systems or 'controls 2' as it is called. This was my last ME class (only physics, math and humanities electives to graduate) and I'm perrrrty happy about it, so now that I'm finally 'out of controls' I can get radical on mopeds again.

To start with I had to fix up this shoddy excuse for a website. I know I should be on here more, but my ADD pulls me toward wasting all my time on the $@#$ing moped forums all the time, starting fights with depressed elderly people and the mentally handicapped. A book I read about ADD said that people with it are drawn to internet forums and chat rooms and mopeds... just kidding about the mopeds part, but its creepy how true that can be.

Anyhow, taking a break from all that nonsense and focusing on this for awhile has it looking better. This whole debacle started with the picture on top getting resized and ended with me getting so mad that i deleted the whole template and just left it with whatever default. The new 'OOC Choppers' website... which this is, of course, comes with a cleaner interface that is easier for your eyeballs to find content on, a left side junk tab which i like better, and a welcome-to-2004 screen width of 1000 pixels.  I also added RSS feeds for everyone's blog and made that shorter so now people who update more often are at the top. Your blog link is now governed by an automatic meritocracy, instead of a myspace-esque 'who do i put at the top' decision that i refused to address.

In the next couple months i'll try to add a couple 'projects' pages for my ongoing projects, and i'll try to get the moped factory blog turned into something useful. I have so many products in development and coming out that i want to make it easier for people to get good setup information and hopefuly i can spend more time producing useful content than repeating the same crummy instructions 20 times. A 'how to properly shim your head' video is needed very badly so i'll try to get that done too. 

On to mopeds, I've been pretty dormant the last couple weeks but got started up again last weekend trying to re-stock some popular items. I made over 30 sets of hobbit rollers, an entire 10 foot chunk of material was cut into tiny pieces... made a couple custom heads that have been on the shelf for a couple weeks, and got some computer design work done. This week i'm trying to get prepped for next weekend, i hope to have two long days of cranking out everything from cylinder shim plates, to batavus intakes... yikes!

Personally I'm trying to get my bridgestone ready for Frozen Snot ride, march 17 this year. Caitlin wants to go so I'm going to try to get a motorcycle fixed up, as the puch polini is still a ways out and totally untested, so she'll have to wait. Frozen snot is always a fun time to bring out your winter project and this Bridgestone is coming along nicely, so i'm pretty excited. I have a ton of work to do, but its starting to come together.

The polini is hours (a lot of hours i guess) away from running, but those hours i just haven't had. The engine is 'done' it just needs to be assembled, really. All the shims and everything are in place, but i need to have 2-3 uninterrupted hours to sit down and piece it together. ZA's aren't black magic or anything, but you do have to take your time and work clean, careful and precise. Currently the garage is pretty messy and 40 degrees, not very condusive to that kind of work. I need a spotless, brightly lit environment to do a good job. Also need to finish fabricating the pipe and piece together a few sundry items such as air filter/velocity stack, intake manifold modded to clear ZA, pedal shaft extension, electrical system. I'm pretty sure at least to start with i'm going to run the 2041 pietcard box on the 'treats' cdi stator. I'm hoping for a mild retard around 8 or 9k rpms. The LK95 pipe i got from Devin at MLM really needs to be retarded when it hits, and there is no way i'm springing 200+ bucks for one of the top dollar CDI units.

Oh yeah, weedwacker? Another in my series of tuned up vintage 2 stroke power equipment. This is about the fewest moving parts you can possibly combine to make a running engine, which makes it cool. I was really missing not having a weed wacker last year with my crazy hillside 'back yard' so this year i can trim the weeds and pick up dog poop!

Ah shoot

Despite being an engineer and having quite a bit of experience with computer type things, writing code, configuring networks, hardware, software... etc. I find myself being completely unable to navigate simple systems. Facebook boggles the hell out of me, "i" phones dont make any damn sense at all, and apparently the totally idiot-proof interface of 'blogger' is beyond my technical sophistication.

Long story short, I started out trying to figure out why the heading photo got resized down to tiny, and somehow i messed up my blog. Now pictures are all whack-sized, colors and themes are lost, and a bunch of time i put into making it somewhat readable over the years is all gone. It took me a couple weeks just to figure out how the heck to get back 'in' to the control interface and make it somewhat legible.

If i get some time here in the next couple weeks i'll try to fix things and add some of the new fun things i've been working on. In the meantime sorry if it looks crazy around here.

I'm putting some time into developing a new website for moped factory, and parent company motzing engineered components, on my own server, without glitzy templates and crap... just something simple and ugly (think geocities style) with good valuable content, then i can keep this blog for updates on dumb stuff like when i changed a throttle cable and when i'm feeling sad about backstreet boys not getting back together, and whatever else dumb stuff that people put on these things... cake photos?

A quick one

Not much to say, trying to blarg at you more often than not here, but its not easy with everything else going on. Plus things in my own garage are pretty stagnant at the moment, haven't made much progress on any of my poorly running bikes.

Despite my best effort however (to avoid buying more bikes), I did acquire another $100 Pinto. I know you guys on the coasts (or anywhere that isn't milwaukee, i guess) will hate me for this, but its almost hard not to buy $100 barn-fresh Pintos here. This would probably be the 7, 8, maybe 9th Pinto that has come to me in about this same condition.

From Blk Pinto 12_11

The throttle cable is ALWAYS broken, the chain is usually froze up (missing in this case), the forks are loose as hell, and the pedals are bent, but the EE-FIDDY is in great shape. No speedo, so no clue what the miles are, but the tires are original and hold air. Not too worn down either.

From Blk Pinto 12_11

It also came with 2 14mm bing carbs and a box of other fail from the previous owner trying to resurrect it. I talked to him and he wants to buy it back from me if I get it running, but the more I think about it, the more hoarder-ey I feel. I've never had one of these with snowflakes before, I usually get the 'red' orange ones with spokes. I dont really like snowflakes but for some reason I really like this little bike. Either way it will have to wait a couple weeks for me to get my dollars up enough to sort it out properly.

Speaking of getting my dollars up (a phrase borrowed from The Illustrious Miles Fox) I've been cranking out new parts like a monkey on crack lately.

I turned a few heads for the Treats gang, the bulk of it Puch stuff, but also trying to bulk up supplies of vespa, motobecane, and there might be a debris laying around somewhere. The Metrakit 65 head I started doing 5 or so years ago is still a hot seller, and my processes (sandblasting, paint, finishing) have gotten a lot better thanks to my new machine shop and upgraded tooling. I daresay these are some of the nicest heads I've ever made.


I also finally put a bracket that has been riding around on the bottom of my sachs since, oh, 2007? into production. The final version is burly 12 ga steel and powdered in MopedFactory blue. It will let you put a Simonini Peugeot Circuit pipe on your lowly Sachs 505. Anybody want to test it on a 504? Freebeeez! The way the pipe is set up from the factory, the header is the exact same size as the nipple of the Athena Kit, but for stockers, you'll need a little shim. I'll be making those very soon so hang on to your hat.

From Sachs simo exhaust bracket

Oh yeah, what else you ask? As if all those fantastic parts that i've been slaving over isn't enough to make you happy, I went ahead and did another production run of ZA-50 Billet oil fill plugs. Why? Because I needed a couple for myself and figured while I was at it, might as well make 20 or so.

From za 50 drain plug

These new ones are, once again, better because of the improved equipment at the new shop. There is a miracle machine there called a 'speed lathe' that makes it easy for me to keep the quality control on these like 300% more consistent. The last batch I ended up throwing out about 1 in 5 due to the o-ring groove getting cut funky, but this batch came out almost perfect. They also are faster to make, but I cant drop the price people, geez they are already cheaper than the 30 year old rubber crap Puch is trying to give you... and it ain't even in stock.

oh yeah these fit in your rare as hell x-50 3 speed hand shift moped engine also, but dont bring it up, i just sold mine and it makes me a very sad panda. Oh well, on to bigger and faster things hopefully.