BLIZZO

On 04/02/2021 at 21:07, Willdat? said:

Good idea - we'll try and get a hustle going by telling everyone it's going to be first in first served...our major limitation to be honest is space for gear in support vehicles.

support vehicles are for pussies who cant tie stuff down good

6 hours ago, oldrx7 said:

ohhh yes - good work, that thing will hold the heat really well!  Gotta start stacking that firewood now too so it's ready for action.

Yea I picked up over 2 m2 of well seasoned plum a week ago so have that stacked away for a start. will start cutting some manuka from sources I have though work to add to the pile.

7 hours ago, anglia4 said:

This was looking so good at Te Uruweras.

I was very impressed with the pannier racks, nice fab work.

I found similar handling issues, (comparing with my massively uncomparable bike), and I put a lot of that down to having so much weight on the back with gear loaded up.

Yea I made the panniers as far forward as I could, the weight is all forward of the rear axle which shouldn’t make it too bad. Dunno I’ll try the smaller front end and see how I go, might get a few ponies back without ass much tyre weight anyway 

got bloody busy trying to get this thing finished in time so didnt do any updates, might as well fill ya'll in now.

So i went to put the engine back together and noticed the little end of the rod and gudgeon were toast. Rather than do down the rabitt hole of getting a new rod i took the crank to my local machine shop and for a mere $50 they honed out the little end and the piston, then machined an oversized gudgeon pin and she was all hoki mai.

That meant I could get stick into throwing it all together.

When doing so I also noticed the gear shift spline was coozed, so ordered a new one through anaconda ex japan that was going to turn up 3 days before leaving for east cape, heeeeeaps of time.

Aliexpress LED looks lightly out of place on a classic styled bike but jeeebus does she throw some lumens.

Resident palmy GC matt cut me out some exhaust flanges so I could make a sweet full stainless pipe and get mitch to tig it all up.

Threw the engine in just wihtout the right side cover and clutch as needed to wait for gear shift arm/spline to turn up for that. stocked with how the black come up

Rolled her out for some sunbathing

I tried a side number plate mount but it ust wasnt gunna work with panniers so ended up going off the rear guard

This jigsaw puzzle took a while

Alloy taped it so I could drop it around to mitch to buzz up

11 hours ago, Truenotch said:

Pretty sure it'll be last year's day 2 but in reverse (which means up hill). It's 155km so you might be 'right, Jim! 

 

ah sweet, the old pump bottle of gas to biff in and then discard as soon as theres enough room in the tank will be aplenty then.

whats our max distance this year? interwebs tell me I should get around 150-160km from my 9L ish Cg125 tank on the XR200 engine

I was then at the point of "what should I do" with the XR200 engine. It ran fine but was a tad smokey. I could have just given it a buff and a coat of black paint but it would be a shame to make the bike nice without giving the engine a once over. I decided to give it a good birthday without splitting the cases and i'm glad I did.

After pulling the rocker cover off its quite evident something has gone on. The inlet valve had been munched against the inlet tappet screw and made a bit of a mess. really weird as the exhaust valve was fine.

The cam also had a decent amount of wear. Luckily the cam journals in the head are pretty bloody good a well as the rockers.

I put in an order with Malcom at Anaconda, new cam, gasket set, inlet valve, tappet screw, rings, , full oil seal kit and full gasket set for less than $300, bargain! I also grabbed a new timing chain, new timing chain guides, clutch plates/steels/springs to put in it too.

While i'm waiting for al that to turn up I got the head and cyl bead blasted. gave the cylinder a good hone and it come up really nice. the exhaust valve seat had a bit of pitting on it so I gave it a cut, did the inlet too while I was there.

Once the valve turns up ill give them both a good lap in.

Couldnt help my self to attack some of the rough casting in the ports. I dont have a proper dome sanding toon to smooth it all out but shell be right, better than what it was factory, especially the exhaust port which was hugely restricted by the casting around the valve guide.

Got the frame back from the sandblasters here in palmy. flicked that off to mitch to finish a few tig welds that we left until it was blasted to get nicer welds. 

Once that was done gave it a good going over with some brakeclean and whacked a couple of coats of etch primer on it.

Just need to get onto painting it now and sticking it all back together.

Leading up to east cape I have been putting a bit of work into the CT185 again. Building two bikes at once (this and the vespa) has its challenges but i'm getting there finally with both of them.

As this will be running full electrics I wanted to make a nice discreet electrics tray for under the seat to hold the CDI, flasher, Battery (capacitor) and the bulk of the loom. Thought the easiest way was to make it out of fibreglass so I whipped up a wooden mould and laid one out. couldnt be bothered doing the whole plug and mould situation to get a nice finish so rough fibreglass will do.

Tuned out alright i think and is fit for purpose. will be painted black to blend in with the black frame.

Then up next was the seat. Easiest way again was fibreglass. I Wrapped everything with glad wrap after pre drilling mount holes. i started by laying 2 layers of cloth and  layer of chop strand mat. let that dry then put it the seat bolts which are joint together with a piece of steel to stop them turning in the base. I then whacked another 3-4 layers of cloth so it gave me a nice strong thick base that the upholstery rivets will go into nicely.

Greg was in the middle of moving at this stage so I decided to share the love and sent the base down to Lewis at Tinwald Canvas and upholstery. Lewis also does amazing work. I gave him an example of what I liked the look of a said fill your boots, I just wanted black suede for that classic rally look and tuck and roll top pattern. i was not disappointed and he did a superb job.

The matty B finish looks really good against the honda red I reckon.

The dirt PK100, now affectionately names "the chuddy" had gross indicator holes on the front legshield and and rear pods, as PK vespas do, so I decided to do a quick slap up job and fill them in.

and a quick one swipe bog smear and she's golden

then a bit of a buzz with the orbital sander followed by a quick hand sand and its good enough for a race bike

its quite convenient that VHT silver wheel paint is almost the exact same colour, so the entire bike got the treatment of one can, no way I was splashing out for two. 

Cut out an alloy blank plate for the left hand rear pod. this will get a race number painted on it eventually. whacked the seat on and its starting to look like a bike again.

I hate checker plate but couldnt think of an easier way to get some grip on the floorboards, so hacked some bits out with he jigsaw and riveted them on. Also ran some rubber trim around the legshield to save severing any limbs.

Filled the headlight in with a piece of alloy, thinking of painting something on it to get away from the blandness, jury is still out on that, was thinking a KC daylighters cover or something.

vespas are rotary valve inlet, opposed to reed. unlike most rotary valve bikes that use a separate disc with a hole in it to set the inlet opening / closing and duration vespas do it a bit of a whacky way. they use one web of the crank to control the inlet, so to modify the inlet timing you "cut the crank" or modify the rotary valve sealing pad that the crank web rotates against.

the photo below shows the "cutout" of the crank, the edge on the right closest to the big end bearing dictates the closing of the inlet ATDC, the edge on the left dictates when the inlet starts opening BTDC. the current timings of this crank, which as a PK100S already has the longest duration of any stock crank is closing at 55degrees ATDC and opening at 110 degrees BTDC.

The science behind inlet timings confuses me, ive read the jennings and G. Bell books but still failed to accurate formulate what my ideal timings would be. talking to Vespa barrys they reckoned leave the inlet closing at the 55 degrees that it is already at in order to not sacrifice mid range power, and have the inlet opening a little earlier. the Jennings book gives a general rule of thumb for "a broad range of power" of having the inlet open "at the same point the transfer ports in the cyl are closed". this results in zero overlap. more peaky engines can run up to and over 10 degrees of overlap. I have cut my crank to now have the inlet opening at around 122 degrees BTDC which is when the trans ports close on my modified stock cylinder.

the image below is the rotary sealing pad of which he crank web with the inlet cutout rotates against (with a very precise fit) to form a seal. You can see there is extra "meat" on the inlet closing ATDC section. Porting this out can have the inlet closing much later, peakier race engines will close around 70 degrees ATDC. im going to stick with the advise of the british vespa barry's however and leave this as is at this stage.

For reference the last two stroke bike I owned, a suzuki GP125, which go bloody well at around 14hp stock but are a little peaky have an inlet that opens 145 BTDC closes 55 ATDC.

O well, hopefully it works.

so, like all things I do, I couldnt really do this vepsa thing in halves, and one wasn't going to be enough. 

I had been talking to one of the blokes in the Palmy SC about various smallframe vespa bits , has a cool hotted up SS90 replica. He mentioned a local old girl that was selling a 60s smallframe 90 that was "all there" but in a few bits and pretty straight. He said what she wanted for it which sounded pretty reasonable so I had a ponder on it. Was a sunday afternoon when @Sparkle was around at my place and he convinced me to go check it out, which we did. Unfortunately were son had pulled it apart and ruined the orignal paint by giving it a barry rattle can job but other than that it was surprisingly OG. I had just brought another smallframe but it was nothing like this so decided to flick on the ratty one and grab this. I struck a deal with the old girl "Trish" and that was that.

Went and picked it up a couple of days ago, its quite the honey and my wifes already in love with it.

So the story is, its a 1966 vespa 90. Some will say that no its a pre '65 Vespa 90 because its a "Small door" model, but ill get to that later.

The Scoot was sold brand new to A Judith Brown from Kaponga in 1966. Patricia (Trish) Martley purchased the scoot off Judith in 1967 when it was a year old. Trish had owned it every since. This is some of the kack that it came with, along with another big box of spare parts

The clever eye will notice the absence of a Piaggio frame number here, under the engine door where its usually located.

And this little tool/rego holder opens up another neat bit of history

Discovered this through the interwebs:

"Up until 1984 NZ had a heavily regulated, central government controlled economy, (on reflection) and in short it was a democratic, benevolently communist environment. As such import licencing was very strictly controlled to protect local manufactures and markets.

Airco, an Auckland based company held the NZ licence to import Piaggio/Douglas Vespa scooters in CKD (completely knocked down) form which they assembled and distributed. The licencing regulations required that a certain amount of local materials/manufacturing/labour/etc went into any imported product to further support/protect NZ businesses and markets. Airco made the seats locally which they badged after themselves and assembled the frames which were stamped with their manufacturing number code (sometimes not stamped at all) .They were then distributed and sold as Vespas to a waiting list of buyers...new, foreign made anything always sold at a huge premium (tariff loading) and had an air of exclusivity.

Models available over time were early wide-bodies, early Douglas Vespa 125 variants, GS160, SS50/90's, Douglas Sportique 150, Super 150, SS180 and Rally 200 and some other models from time to time along with the odd, VERY expensive, privately imported machine (and you needed a very large stash of foreign funds to get passed the authorities).

They were available in an almost Henry Ford rainbow of colour options...Roma Red, Peacock Blue and "appliance" White.

NZ never had a VIN system back then (pre golbalisation/Americanisation). Vehicles were registered at the Post Office by chassis/frame number and engine number. Registration had nothing to do with a certificate of ownership (no one ever had such a document), it merely documented vehicle information as cover for a Government tax. Airco stamped the frames with a manufacturing number (4 digits) on the frame which became by default the frame number. I had one SS with no frame number at all (probably a replaced frame at some stage) but the rego paper had a frame number recorded. It wasn't until the late 80's that NZ adopted the VIN system, registration papers became obsolete and everything became computerised to the global standard"

So yea pretty rad.

Not too sure what the plan is, I like the OG poverty pack look of the steel wheels etc. Will likely build a nice torquey polini 130 engine for it or something with a vintage looking faco pipe. dumb thing is the 90s are 3 speed so could either leave it that or convert to 4 speed. but yea, all original build but with a bit more boogie, bit of a sleeper etc. Its down on the project list so will have to wait. its a shame its had the respray, because of that I might have it blasted, properly panel beaten and resprayed in the original color. wouldn't use base/clear though, i hate stuff that's restored shinier than what they were new!
 

1 hour ago, flyingbrick said:

Computer chair swivel stand is genius 

yea it was a beautiful accident that one. it was my "workshop stool" but is perfect for holding smallframe vespas. so handy to just easily push it around the workshop.

found out why the clutch was dicky, aside from having almost no cork left the locating tabs had been based to shit by the basket, there was about 60ml of oil in the poor bloody thing.

While I was at it I "lightened" the flywheel by heating up the ring gear and bashing it off. no need for electric legs when you have 3 ample sized real ones.

Next up on list of “wow check out how fucked this is” was the bolts holding the rear wheel to the hub. They had obviously been left loose and the wheel had been chattering for quite some time. Photo below was one of the better ones. Someones lucky they didn’t die.

So I got talking to a bunch of Vespa dudes about how I can make this go “well enough for a bit of fun at dirtmasters” but I didn’t want to go dropping several hundred dollars on a Polini/Malossi cylinder kit. I was wanted to do some barry mods and bolt some second hand shit on to get it going well enough to be a bit of a laugh to ride. Spoke to a bloke named Matthew Brookes who’s now down in Milton and is well versed in these things. Less than 200 dolarydoos later I had a new seat (the single seat was shit) a PK125 3 port barrel and head, a new piston and rings, an alloy packer (will get to that later) and all the gaskets/seals and shit id need to rebuild. I thought about changing the primary gears too but the low 100 gears which top out around 80 would be better for around town / on the dirt.

First thing I did was strip the cases and port them to match the transfer ports on the cylinder. This was easy using the packer as a template.

The thing was pretty bloody grubby on the inside. I ended up completely stripping the cases and bead blasting them.

On the flywheel side of the engine these things use a weird 2-piece bearing that makes it easy to split the cases. Sadly, for me this thig was koozed, was all carboned up and super grumbly, so off it came.

Unsure if it’s an Indian PK125 copy or something but I havn’t seen one that either uses a copper headgasket or Oring like this does. Ill grab a viton Oring to use as a gasket anyway.

Well that was dumb. Seems we lost the days posts, including the first new thread I've Started in like 4 years. Oh well ill start again.

So went something like:

Ive never really been a Vespa foamer, they are European and 2 stroke, that's two things that have never gone that well for me and both combined. 

About a year ago a fellow penny pincher, Ghalal got given a PK100s that someone had stripped to "modify" but realized they weren't even capable of undoing wheel nuts so gave up. unfortunately they lost all of the bits they took off (quite a few bits) so it sat in a sad state until it was given to G for free. It then sat in a sad state at G's place, he tried to get it to spark but it wouldn't so he gave up on it. Over lockdown I did a bunch of work on a C100 that PPSC and friends put together to donate to G after his bike got stolen. Being the bloody nice bloke that he is, and in lieu of his work G donated the Vespa to me. I didn't think too much of it and just poked it in the corner. This is how it arrived.

Que QCR Dirtmasters being announced with a 125cc limit, my other small bike is a 140cc and there was emphasis on least practical bikes as possible so I thought building this thing would be perfect. I did a bit of interwebs searching and found that the Italians build these smallframes (mostly PKs as they are "undesirable to vespa barry's) into 17hp hotrods and launch them around full sized MX tracks. that's my inspo sported.

So I needed to get the thing to run. i stripped out all the wiring and hooked up the 2 wires that the CDI / engine needs to run and whammo she fired. well after considerable push starting and start ya bastard down the street it fired. it was a slow as a wet week and ran like a bad of shit, clutch was also super weird, more investigation needed.

Before I got to pulling the engine I wanted to weld the frame brace in so did that out of some 25mm tube. She's a full 3/4 race scoot now.

Pulled the engine and started stripping it down, jeeze these things get grubby

Yea pencil me and the clit tickler 185 in 

On 12/08/2020 at 18:20, Kimjon said:

Whats your plans for the tank? Thats not a loaded question, just curious if you're going to pin stripe, or lay down some racing stripes/numbers or something?

just an FYI for dudes who havnt seen the tank in person, it is wayyyyyyy more mustard / lush in person. for some reason it photographs really yellow, particularly in unnatural light.

like yea you will probably be waiting for people to catch up a fair bit and shit. but i have to do that anyway just cos im a silly cunt.  You will still have fun and sink heaps of tins and THAT, is what this ride is all about.

/ Lifan your CT

yea @00quattro00 the Baja would be fine man. I took my XR250r as a backup bike last year but didnt need it in the end so it stayed at J5s place. Im riding an XR200r swapped CT (your old one) so its not that different really.

Fuck yea I see 7 penny pinchers on that list. Def gunna win the gang fight this year 

When looking for an XR200 engine this CT185 popped up on here. grabbed it for the engine which was supposed to be an XR200 but was actually a lame mishmash of Xl185/ATC200 parts with boring cam and compression so that went under the bench, but thought i might try work with the frame, which was worked out alright, just needs a new rear section.

Rear hoop and stays got hacked off, new one getting made this weekend.

to make the front end work with the CG tank without smashing the shit out of it / having no lock i needed so offset triples. after oodles of searching what would fit nicely i found some 80's CB125T triples, snapped them up and whacked them on and was golden. good lock and no knock.

You can see here i have whacked some classy golden boys on as well. 3.5-19" front and 4.0-19" rear. front only just fits, but ive got a bit of a plan here to get some more clearance and will run incise dust caps.