Bropeds

April 2, 2014

Maiden Voyage!

So I come from a family of wrenchers, both of my two brother and my dad have always been into working on cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles and basically anything else with an engine. My dad’s had a ton of motorcycle’s over the years and has a patent for a motorcycle trike conversion kit.

I was kind of a different story I liked cars, snowmobiles, etc., but only I was only into riding them. I’d change oil and brakes on my car, but that’s it. I didn’t really dive face first into mechanics until I was about 30 or so then I was all in. First with cars then a little bit of scooters,now mopeds and motorcycles.

So in the back of my head I kept wanting to get my brothers into mopeds and have them experience the glory that is a 35 year old two stroke moped. I kept telling them “hey you should get a moped” “hey you should get a moped” “hey you should get a moped” “hey you should get a moped” “hey you should get a moped” “hey you should get a moped”.

Bye Bye Tomos!

Eventually I decided to take matters into my own hands. I kept going back and forth on whether to sell my Tomos or not last year. It’s kind of an odd man out, all of my other bikes are Puchs and Peugeots now. I wanted to simplify the spare parts and engines I keep on hand. I ended up trading it to Kaptain Kim one of my fellow Casserollers for two mostly complete project bikes. A honda hobbit and a cimatti city bike. I figured those would be great starter peds for my brothers so that’s what they got from me for Christmas.

I know every ped brand out there has it’s fans, but I wanted them to start out with some bikes that have a lot of performance options. The Honda PA50 and the Minarelli V1 engines have a plethora of kits/pipes out there all set to make them go fast. I’d hate to have them start out with say a jawa/sachs/morini and get bored or want to switch right away to a maxi for ez mode performance options once they got a better understanding of mopeds.

Well my brother Tim got the City Bike and Kevin got the Hobbit. Kevin hasn’t really worked on his yet, he’s messing with a car project at the moment. Tim recently dove into the city bike…

Intake a la handlebar exhaust flange

He picked up a 21mm dellorto phbg spigot mount carb, a motion left cali pipe and a polini 80cc cylinder kit. Talk about doing it right! No baby steps for Tim.

We fabbed up a few minor things to get it going. We chopped the flange off his old stock pipe and combined it with a hunk of handlebar I had laying around to make and intake. The internal diameter on the handlebar is only about 19mm so to get the most out of his carb he’ll want to upgrade that at some point, but for now it was an easy setup. (and it didn’t cost us $50 +shipping)

Bracket Adapter for the new pipe

The other thing we need to address was a hanger for the MLM Cali pipe. The stock pipe rides much closer to the frame then the Cali does thus the hanger that’s built into the frame is way too far back. Ordinarily I’d just do some bending, chopping and hacking to make the existing bracket play nice with the new pipe, but the bike has a decent paint job so Tim isn’t planning on repainting it anytime soon and wanted to keep it looking nice. So we built a little bracket that connects to the existing mount and matches it up to the new pipe.

We kept the kit simple, a simple chamfering of the ports, not porting, no case, intake, or exhaust matching. Just bolt it on and go. I took an educated guess on the initial jetting we went with a 45 idle and an 86 main and it’s pretty spot on. Maybe a little bit of fine tuning, but it runs and it rips. That polini is a solid kit, super torquey.

For more details and pics check out the project page!.