Puch sealed bearing conversion

At some point over the last year my Newport developed an annoying squeak in the front end. I think it was related to the brakes, because I could partially pull the brake lever and it would go away. I'm not sure why I was so lazy about working on it, but I was. Someone made a comment to me about it the other day and that was enough motivation for me to get it fixed.

When I thought about tearing it apart, I realized I didn't want to deal with the grease and loose ball bearings anymore. I don't have much of a complaint about how they work when they are dialed in, but they are messy and can take some fine tuning to get them adjusted properly.

I read through this wiki on Moped Army before I got started:
Puch Sealed Bearing Conversion Wiki

I ordered my 6001zz bearings through Amazon. I ordered a new 12mm axle through Treats, which came with a bunch of spacers on it. And I ordered my .5mm shim stock from Honest. It's unfortunate how much this conversion costs. It's about $40 per wheel when you add up all of those parts.

Here is how the shim stock showed up.



Here is what my bearings looked like when I took the wheel apart. You can see the sponge from the speedometer housing in there. I wasn't using it anyway, so I eliminated it.



I used my angle grinder with a cutoff wheel to cut the shim stock. That was pretty easy to do.



I think the most difficult part of this was forming the shim stock into enough of a circle to fit it inside the wheel. I initially tried to form it around the bearing itself, but the steel was so springy that it wouldn't hold the shapre. From there I decided to use some needle nose pliers and slowly form the part by hand. That worked out pretty well, but I had to spend a lot of time on it.

Here you can see the bearing and the shim stock in place. You can also see the spacer that is in between the two bearings.



I ended up having to stack a few of the spacers on one side to get the wheel centered. Since I am running Gazelles and a front fender, the centering is very critical.



On the other side I used a spacer under the brake plate and had to use washers on the outside. I plan to make one spacer to take place of those washers and another single spacer to take place of the three I used on the other side.



I haven't had a chance to ride the bike yet, but spinning the wheel on the stand felt nice and solid.

Maybe new forks and a disc brake conversion will be next?

Pinto tail light - Round 2

I started off with one of those Tun LED tail lights, but even with my 12V lighting coil it wouldn't work. I could hook it up to a 12V battery and it would work fine, but I got nothing out of it on the bike. After taking the bike to MLM for some tuning, I realized the light didn't even work when hooked up to a battery. I'm thinking it quickly blew up, even though I never saw it work to begin with. I liked the light, but I don't like that you can't replace the bulb for it. I'd end up spending $18 shipped for each new light while I worked out my electrical issues. That's not cool.

So, I switched over to another light that Treats has. It's fairly low profile and has replaceable bulbs. It even has a clear section on the bottom for your license plate, which I would thought would work out well during my initial license plate mounting plan. Oh well.

Last weekend I cut the light mounting plate out of 1/8" steel. I then welded it to the bottom of my seat pan.



Here it is with the seat cover back on and the tail light mounted.



And here it is on the bike.



I like the way it looks overall. I was thinking that I could probably bend the bracket a little bit, so the light is closer to the seat. However, I want it to remain visible and I kind of like that I can still fit my hand in there, which makes moving the bike around much easier. I think I'll leave it for now.