Just slightly corroded

Fall ride

I hope we don't run out of these nice days anytime soon.

Radium City Presents: Parks and Wreck 2: Don't Drink The Water

This was our 2nd rally.  I couldn't be happier with how everything turned out.  The property we stayed on was just as nice as I knew it would be.  The people that showed up were a lot of fun.  It was cool to see a lot of the people that I have met at other rallies.  We all had a great time.

Rally camp. 

Ready for people to show up.

Getting ready for Saturday's main ride.  I think we had about 55 bikes this year. 

Rob's nice Magnum. 

Gas station. 

Fort at Mathiessen State Park.

Leaving the state park.  Heading back to camp.

Logan Lionz...tall bike.

Mid-rally skate session.  I'm glad we made time for this!

Mike ripping it on a loaner deck.

Radium Chilly.

Raffle.  Jason won a bunch more stuff...go figure.

Logan Lionz walked away with the sweet bag set though.

Radium Glasses.

Flandria

Jet holder

Trailer

It's not quite finished, but it's getting there.  I still need to add the center tie downs and do the wiring.

Trailer wheel chocks

I picked up some 3" C channel, notched it, and used a torch to bend it into this shape.  It's perfect for even a Gazelle.

Hitch installed

This is all part of my master plan to go to more rallies and be able to pick up more project bikes.

8 star sealed bearings

This is what was left of my loose bearing race after I tried to ride the Pinto a few weeks ago.  It's time for sealed bearings.

Phil's bike

He's been working extra hard on this for a year.  It's 90%now and today was the first ride.  Nice work, Phil.

Giving up the domain name

I've had leftovermopeds.com for a few years now, but I'm tired of paying for it.  It expires next week, so I'm going to give this a try instead.  I hope it will be a little easier to update and it will work better with my phone.  I will likely post pictures more often if that is the case.

Newport I've been working on

A local guy has some property that we want to use for our rally at the end of September. I found this out when a mutual friend of our mentioned that he had an old "scooter" that he would like to get running again. That "scooter" turned out to be a Newport that was rode hard and put away wet...literally. The gas tank was so varnished on this bike that the engine hard seized on it after I got it running. I emptied out the old fuel and put new in, but I had no idea how much varnish was still sitting in the bottom of the tank. After the 2nd seize, a friend and I decided to give the tank a full Kreem treatment and get it fixed for good.

Now it is running well and it has a new long seat and a couple of new cables. I kind of like the combination of tall bars and a slammed long seat on this bike.

Motobecane 50VLX

I just picked this up recently. It's really dirty and needs a lot of work, but it's complete. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. It has so much potential...I don't think I can just let it go.

Radium City presents: Parks and Wreck 2:...Don't Drink The Water

This is our 2nd rally. We learned a lot from the first one. This one will be better. Join us...we're about 1.5 hours SW of Chicago.



Facebook event page

Got the Newport running again

Last weekend I put the cylinder back on the bike and fired it up. It started on the first kick, which was nice. I've ridden it around a few times since then and it seems to be doing well. I've been checking the head temperatures with a temp gun, since I had to give up on my trail tech temp gauge. I haven't taken it above half throttle yet, but the highest temperature I have seen is 260 degrees...and that's even with 90 degree ambient tempteratures. I'm looking forward to putting some more miles on it.

metrakit machining

After soft seizing my metrakit 65 at the lafayeti rally a few times, I decided to buy a larger piston and have the cylinder machined. This probably saved me $60 compared to buying a new kit, but it took a while to find a machine shop that was willing to do it. I picked it up last night and it looks pretty good. It doesn't have quite as much cross hatching as I would like, but it isn't bad. I'm going to run it and see how it does.

Piston size: 43.85mm
Bore size: 43.92mm

That's about .003" clearance, which is what I asked them to do.

I also upjetted a few sizes from 86 to 91...just in case. I was hoping I had an 88 jet but I don't. Maybe one of the other Radium City guys will come through for me.

Metrakit soft seize

As I was cranking along at a fairly high rate of speed at 2:30 AM on the Friday night of the Lafeyeti Rally, I was feeling pretty good about my Newport, until it soft seized. I initially thought I just hit a cool, dense pocket of air, because the bike has been really consistent for a few years now, but a comment that Responsible Jon said made me rethink that. He said I should retard the timing a little bit. Hmmm...I haven't checked my timing for quite a while.

After watching Devin from MLM work on my Pinto timing, I realized I should probably consider buying a metric dial indicator. I picked this one up on ebay for about $40 shipped. I also grabbed the adapter setup from Motion Pro for about $20 shipped.



With the new tools I found out that my bike was setup for the spark to happen at 1.8mm BTDC. That's way too far advanced for an E50. I backed it off to just under 1.2mm and called it good. It was definitely nice having the proper tools for this.

After I finished that, I pulled the piston/cylinder off of the bike. This is what it looked like after 3 soft seizes during the rally. I definitely need a new piston.



I ordered up a new one from Treats...the next size up. I'm hoping to get it this week, so I can find a local machine shop to bore out the cylinder.

Lafayeti Rally Pictures

Here are all the pictures I took. I'll highlight a few below, but if you want to look through the entire group click the link.

Lafayeti Rally Pics

Three of us left Radium City a little later than planned friday night.



We rolled into Lafayette around 10:30. We immediately unloaded the bikes and headed for the pinball arcade. There were a few people hanging around, but not many. So, we hit up Lafayette Brewing for a couple of beers.

When we got back to Phil’s house that night we heard there was a group of people heading out for a LONG night ride. Since we arrived a little late for the other night rides, we decided to join this one. It was definitely worth it. There were lots of fast bikes on the ride and destination was amazing. We basically rode way out into the country (~15 miles) and parked at the base of one of the windmills. I have never been that close to one of those before. We have a bunch of them around here, but I haven’t taken the time to stop and see them up close. I had no idea they were so loud. It was a little creepy being that close…it was the combination of the huge size, the red glow of the light, and the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere.

On the way back into town from there, on a pitch black country road, we hit a cooler patch of air and my bike didn’t like that. It immediately soft seized with no warning. Damn. Fortunately, Rich, one of the Lafayetis, was nice enough to stop and make sure I was ok. I really had no idea what I was going to do. We were miles from anywhere and it was probably 2:30 AM. He suggested that I jump on my bike and he would push me back into town. Push me?! Really?! Sure enough…his bike was a champ and it managed to haul him, me, and my bike the 3-ish miles back to town. Crazy! Thanks again, Rich.

Here’s his bike:



The next morning I took my metra 65 apart to find this:



It wasn’t that bad, so I cleaned it up, made sure the rings weren’t stuck, and put it back together.

Kyle’s hobbit also had some issues, so he pulled his carb and cleaned it up.



Best chase van ever. It could use a bigger idle jet though.






The long ride started at the park on Saturday morning.





I made it about ½ way through this ride and the bike seized again. It was lonely when the pack of ~50 bikes left me. Again, I had no idea where I was or what I was going to do. Fortunately, Brian, another Lafayeti, stopped by to make sure the van was going to pick me up.



Loading more bikes, including our 2nd Radium City breakdown, in the chase van.



Swimming hole:



Seb’s bike broke down right as he rolled into that park. Instead of admitting defeat and riding in the chase van, he opted to ride dubs with Justin on basically a stock Maxi. I’m not sure how they got separated from the group, but they ended up hanging with us the rest of the afternoon. It was super funny to watch those guys.





Pizza back at Rich’s place:



Phil making Mountain Dew Baja Blast:



Raffle items:



We won the raffle tickets themselves, which will be great for our rally:



Playing stumps:



Since all of our bikes were broken down at this point, none of us attended the adventure ride. Instead we took all of the drunk people to the Ben Hur.



There we played pool and drank PBR for several more hours.



Overall we had a fantastic trip. The Lafayetis were great hosts and I don’t think it could have worked out much better than it did, despite our bike issues. We will definitely go back!