ciaociao

well, it’s crunch time again. i decided it was time to prioritize what i had left to do for ciaocioa to finish her. i decided the most important, at the top of the list thing that needs to happen, is to get the electronic system and the intake finished. these are things that absolutely need to happen before she’s on the road.
last sunday i went down to mikemike’s and did some work on the mill to make the stator plate we are using fit. all i really had to do was drill some holes in it, and mill it down to be half as thick as it was. then we had to turn the inner hole out a bit larger to clear the bearing seal and it was golden.
here it is sitting in the motor.

notice all the extra holes everywhere. this plate originally went to something else, we used it because it took little to make it fit proper. we’ll only be using the three holes that bolt the plate to the motor, the rest will go unused.
here it is with the rotor and coil set on it something like it will be when it’s all mounted up proper.

you can see how small the rotor is. the little holes in it will be drilled out a bit more and tapped for the alum fan adapter plate to bolt on, which will allow use of the plastic fan i stole from a parted out kinetic.
i hope this weekend to go in and bust out the intake for it. i’ll be using the dellorto si carb to start with.

it uses crazy car-carb-like press-in jets, but they are readily available at pretty much any serious scooter shop. i can also order up what ever i need at the shop, so that’s good.
these carbs are found stock on the old, bigger vespa scooters, so there’s a bit of novelty using it on my vespa ciao.
i chose it for a few reasons; flat slide, down draft (makes building an intake much easier), novelty, availability of jets and parts, and best of all, it was free! thanks jeb!
ok, so those are the things i am going to focus on until they are done.
however, a running engine is no good if you don’t have a bike to put it in..
since my time at mikemike’s shop is reserved for those two bits for now, i’m going to put off the fork swing arms until i get them done.
even if i had the swing arms done, i’d still have to lathe out the stem adapter before i could use that for.. so for now i am going to just use the heavier bravo forks that i was rocking on the orange ciao for so long. i’m also using orange ciao’s handle bars, controls and grips.
tonight i bolted the fork on and threw a too-small axle in the front wheel just to put everything together to see how it looked, and it’s going to be awesome. i forgot my camera here today, so no pictures. i’ll get some tomorrow.