Well hello mr. hoobit.

Phil gave me a hobbit. Well, by gave I mean I said, "How about I trade you my 2 speed hercules for the hobbit and your forks?" And he said, "Sounds fair, but how about I just leave the Hercules at your house?"
So now I have a hobbit. Which is great!

I took the hobbit over to Travis' garage the other day to see if we couldn't get'r running.
Travis was concerned about how much the rear wheel was dragging so we popped the freewheel off to access the brake plate and this is what we discovered.


So in the first photo, you can see on the left the brake drum liner that has separated from the brake hub, and then proceeded to swirl around and around within the hub. The second picture shows the mangled up brake shoes and somehow a large tangle of brake cable also got in there?
Travis was very amused.


The bike was originally missing some things, a tank, a petcock, an exhaust pipe, and brake shoes. But with Travis' generosity we scrounged up some spare parts and got it running. I still need to do a little bit of work on it, there's currently no lights and it needs a new rear tube, but all in all in should be a great little loaner.

DEATHped is still coming along, I've reach a financial impasse so hopefully on I'll be able to finish it up.

I'm an idiot.

So, it turns out that the Derbi was out of gas. the stock Derbi petcock looks like this:

The tank of a derbi variant is plastic and so rather than having a petcock that threads on, the petcock slips inside the outlet a the base of the tank and then a hose clamp secures it in place.

Now, if this petcock had been made with metal it would have been great. The problem is that every time someone needs to change the jetting in the carb, you have to push the petcock out of the way and eventually all of this tweaking just makes the plastic valve portion of the petcock crack and leak and then drain all of your gas out. I'm working on a solution right now but since I currently working, I don't have much time for moped work.
Here is where the crack is on my petcock:

One idea that I came up with was to take a pinto petcock (12mm) and adapt it to fit the 16mm opening of the tank. I called my dad and asked for his advice and he suggested wrapping the pinto petcock in teflon tape.

It didn't work.
So, Jona from the Ghostriders is sending me a replacement stock petcock and hopefully that will do me just fine.

In other news, I did get some TJT clutch springs.

Travis has been telling me that these particular springs are a necessity and in the brief test ride I took I have to agree. From a dead stop they really rev up nice and high before engaging which creates a sensation like popping the clutch on a manual transmission. Rooooom!!! BraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! That's what it sounds like.

Update: Rosanna just traded old Red and Gold for this...

Zing!

How to spend a day less than efficiently.

Recently Rosanna's engine has been making odd noises and running poorly.
So a couple of days ago, nice guy Phil helped me swap out motors on Rosanna's bike so that I could investigate the noises and fix this engine.

WEDNESDAY
I packed up the engine, threw it on my back, and rode over to 'ol ADD Motorworks and Pinball Amusements. As it turns out, one of the clutch shims was just a little too thick. The circlip that holds the clutch bell tight popped loose and was causing the clutch to rub on the inside of the clutch bell. Here is a picture of the culprit:

Notice the scrape marks that go around the inside of the clutch bell.

Travis told me that he had a selection of clutch shims at his house on Capitol Hill but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to repacking the motor and carrying it another 5 miles on my rigid bike through the rough streets of Seattle. So instead I thought, "Why not just sand down this shim to fit. It's pretty close already, right? right? right? right?" I didn't actually repeat "right" but my memory of that statement echoes ominously.

I filed and sanded that thing for 3 hours. Every time I'd check it, the shim would be a little bit closer but not quite thin enough. Eventually, I decided it was good enough (by which I mean I had had enough) and slapped the clutch assembly back together.

THURSDAY
In an attempt to maximize the usable space in our shop, I built shelves so that Rosanna and I can organize all of the things that were on the floor.

The shop last spring:


The shop today:


I realize that these two photos don't show exactly the same area of the shed but just absorb these images on the level that one is oppressive and dark and the other is light and soothing. At least that's how I feel when I look at them.

Anywho, the point of all this is that while organizing my newly built shelves I found a clutch shim that I must have squirreled away at some point in history. I popped the shim in and voila! It worked much better than the painstakingy sanded one.

The moral of this story?

Don't be lazy/stupid. Even if modifying the part you have seems like less work than finding the correct component, it'll get you in the end.

Now enjoy this amazing scene from The Shining:

Failure failure failure...

I find myself often ignoring the idea that a stock moped is a dependable moped and a souped (suped?) up moped is likely to be faster but exponentially more likely to break. Why do I do this? Because I'm an idiot that's why. Get off my back, what have you done lately?

Since slapping the Pinto together I have had moments of glory within ages of pure chagrin. Lately, the quest for glory has been to install the new cdi that treats has recently come out with. So far I have spent about a week dicking around on it, timing it, trying various cdi controllers, installing a proper kill switch, etc. I have managed to get it running, however, the incredible performance increase that I was hoping for has actually manifested itself as a mediocre performance decrease. I get about 5-8mph less top speed than I did before and my low end is worse. Hmmm.... I don't think that the fault lies within the unit itself, I suspect that I'm probably doing something wrong and have lately been considering a full breakdown and build up of this bike from scratch.

One major performance issue has been a top speed surging. When I hit the top of my power, rather than it just sort of hanging out there, the bike surges and loses power until I lay off on the throttle a little bit. It was exhibiting this same issue in L.A. and I thought that it was perhaps an issue with the Tillotson carburetor. However, Michael Mike, the mechanic whose example I usually follow, has not seen this problem in the nearly identical setup that he built so now I search for the root of the issue.

A) Fuel Flow
Perhaps I am just not pushing enough fuel through my carb. My petcock is fairly janky and so maybe when I hit the top speed I'm simply not getting enough fuel pushed through the carb. I had a little fuel pump kicking around my shop so last night I thought I'd throw it in there and see if anything improved. I tied it in to the pumper line on the bike and also tied in the fuel line and it didn't seem to effect anything negatively... until this morning when I couldn't start the bike at all. I suspect that over night the carb drained dry and now I need to prime the carb prior to starting it so that I have some suction. Lame. The problem is that I couldn't prime the carb and start it in place because I munched my pedal chain tensioner and had no pedal chain. The fuel pump also didn't seem to effect the surging issue so for now I'm thinking it may not be the fuel flow. Unless it's the petcock that is causing issues...

B) Dented up header on the pipe
My pipe is in pretty bad shape. Not so horrible that it won't run, but it certainly isn't helping things.

C) Seized up blued up kit
My 64cc polini has treated me pretty well if you don't consider the three times it's near-cataclysmically exploded on me. I've replaced the piston once, and the rings twice. It CAN go fast sometimes, but I feel like when you are making fine adjustments on a every other piece of equipment and the main hunk of metal that produces the power looks like it's been chewed by truckasaurus... it might be time to throw in the towel on ol' polini power and buy a cheap kit that I can hack on. "Rosanna, I need to buy a new kit. Do we really need to eat this month?" Probably will not happen for a while.

I think my issues come down to this truth that Responsible Jon so eloquently stated, "Kitted mopeds are only reliable if you are willing to replace EVERYTHING. Even the things that are sort of still working." Essentially, if I want to continue using this crap bucket as a daily rider, I'm going to need set it aside, ride my stockers to work and back and spend time and money slowly on the super bike, taking my time to figure things out instead of plugging the sieve holes one at a time.

I'll illustrate this post with photos of my blued up parts later.

What do you do with unlimited time and limited funds?

Try to start an engine sans bike. Duh.



No success yet, perhaps if I clean the carb.

Pedaling pedaling endless pedaling...

When I first got the pinto slapped back together I had some trouble with the carburation and the electrical. My pain is your gain though, here is some video of me pedaling around trying to get it to start (notice the lack of seat... perhaps it was better that I didn't get it to fire up)

Pedal pedal pedal... from Joel Kvernmo on Vimeo

...even more pedaling! from Joel Kvernmo on Vimeo.