i’m busting my butt trying to get ciaociao v2.0 to the la rally, but i’ve seem to misplaced a box of crucial parts.. i’m sure it will turn up, i just hope it does soon. like today.
i’m not going to have the bike painted before the rally, but i was able to put a couple coats of brown primer on it. it looks like ass, the brown primer with the blue and green bits really looks silly, but that’s ok. once i get back from cali with it, i’m going to sand blast everything and paint it for real.
so yeah, if you’re going to the rally, bring a paint pen (i may have some on me) and you can draw whatever you want on ciaociao! well, just the frame. i’m going to be bummed if people start drawing on my pipe or something that’s not getting painted.. haha.
but yeah, blank canvas for you!
see you in la? hope so!
sorry it’s been slow around here. i have the frame completely stripped down to just the paint, and once i find a donor bicycle to chop up i can start welding everything together and get it powder coated.
that’s pretty much why it’s taking me so long, i have to save for the paint job. i will be coating it all black (frame, fork, wheels, everything) and then painting the pink/white/brown on top of that.
that way as the paint chips off, it will be a nice, hard powder coat shell underneath.
anyway, i just wanted to give you guys a quick update.
seeing the bike in a pile of parts was making me sad, so i decided to go ahead and start putting the thing together. this will be ciaociao v0.1a, seattle rally mode! haha.
no welding done on the frame yet, no cross bar. the custom fork isn’t ready, so i’ll be running with the a bravo fork (which just happens to match the rattle can paint job on ciaociao’s frame!), altered to fit the larger front axle.
no motor yet, as you can see. i couldn’t get a hold of mikemike this weekend to see if i could go to his shop and work on it, which sucks. i think he was probably more worried about working on his own project anyway.
the cdi should be close to ready to go, unless mikemike has been too busy to work on it at all.. it’s the intake i was hoping to get in there to work on. maybe sometime this week? i’m running out of time! i don’t even know what to do for jetting yet! fuck.
anyway, it should be running, even if running shitty, for the rally. it’s so close, i don’t see how it could not be.
i even added a basket to the front to carry my gas can for the long ride out to camping at our rally!
also, you guys should come to our rally! it’s going to be epic!
so i’ve made some progress since the last update.
in the frame department, i chopped the seat post part down further, should have the seat nice and low now!
i also ripped out the center stand, as i will be using the side stand i bought forever ago on this bike. once i modify it to fit the frame the way i want it to, i’ll hack the center mounts off the frame.
as it stands, i have the frame down to just over 12.5lbs, including all the grime and chain tensioner still on the frame.
not too bad, but, as i said, i’ll be hacking more off soon. i’ll also be welding more back on (frame brace, seam welding), so i’ll probably end up about 15lbs or so. about 4lbs lighter than a stripped down puch frame.
the struts for the front fork showed up the other day too!
rather than modifying the fork swing arms for the larger axle and trying to rig up some kind of mounting system for these dampeners, i think i’m going to make all new swing arms. at 80lbs of pressure a piece, i don’t think i need the stock springs anymore. and if i make custom swing arms, i can provide multiple mounting spots for the struts, giving me on-the-fly adjustable front suspension! awesome!
that is all for now. i have been challenged to a 50cc race off by erin of the puddlecutters, and we have decided to turn it into a mini-rally event, so most of my free time will be put into that for a little while. i’m still confident that ciaociao will be in rough draft forum for the puddlecutter rally, i am even still planning to ride it down to portland! so keep watching, i’ll have more for you soon.
as some of you have noticed on spacemanicecream.net, have started a blog for the 50cc bike, the 50cciao, though i probably won’t do much posting about what all i’m doing, as i know erin reads it and i don’t want her to know my secrets! yet, anyway.
i’m thinking of keeping that one a photo blog strictly.
anyway, till next time.
so i guess i have three choices when it comes to getting ciaociao painted/coated.
1-i could put ciaociao and all the parts on bigmo (mosquito fleet school bus) to have it transported down to la for the rally and give everything to rafter to let those guys do it for me. everything powder coated, pro finish, awesome kids that i love doing the work for me. down sides are that i would then have to pay shipping to have it sent back up to me once done, and it’s spendy. rafter quoted me a great price, and said he could hook me up cos he luvz me, but it’s still pretty spendy.
2-felony flyers is this super rad chopper shop here in ballard. they supported our rally last year by being a sponsor, and are a local home grown biz. the guy has been building custom choppers for like 16 years or some such, and they have been featured in many biker rags country wide. i sent him an email earlier today asking if he could do it, and if he could give me a rough quote. he got back to me this evening. his price would be about the same as what rafter quoted me, less shipping of course. powder coated, pro quality, supporting my neighbor. downside, agian, price.
3-borrow mikemike’s paint gun and painting the fucker myself in my driveway. downsides are paint will go to shit much quicker than powder, it will probably look crappy because i don’t know what i’m doing, and i’m lazy. plus side is that it would be one hell of a lot cheaper.
so yeah, what to do, what to do.. i better think on this one.
oh sweet! my headlight showed up today!
the thing is SUPER BRIGHT! 150 lumens for three and a half hours on high! only 92 lumens for 7 hours on low, but even that is brighter than most moped headlights! plus i can swap it over to my bicycles in like 10 seconds! sweet action, for sure!
the whole thing weighs 232 grams, whatever that is! it’s light! no pun intended? eh
picture!
you can also see the pink stem and bar ends and white pedals in that pic. neat!
tomorrow i’m going to bent bike with mikemike to check stuff out. i already ordered bars for ciaociao, but it’ll be fun to look around anyway. i’d like to find a smaller rear sprocket for magnomos, but that’s got nothing to do with this blog, so i’ll leave it at that.
anyway, i’m a little tipsy right now, so i’m going to go to bed. night!
last night, in the moped army chat thingy, i showed a couple kids a sneak peak of the paint job i have lined up for ciaociao and i got mixed reactions, kind of like i knew i would.
there were two paint jobs that i was torn between, the deciding factor was that the variated ciao side covers aren’t available here, and i would have to send off for them, and then i would have to paint them as they don’t come in white.
these are a couple sketchs of the two color combo i was having a hard time picking between.
spaceman icecream:
and the blue scheme that would have required the special side covers:
there’s no denying that the second one is way cuter and looks awesome, but i really like the neapolitan and it doesn’t require side covers to get the look i want. also, i get to show off the variator and whatnot without side covers!
i’ll be using the pink and blue scheme on something eventually anyway, so there it is.
what do you guys think? i reckon some of you will like it, and others will think it’s dumb, and most of you will like the blue one better. haha
i’ll be going to pick out the colors this weekend, i think.
Filed under: cosmetic, crank, intake, kit, lighting, malossi, motor, new parts!, paint, pinasco
so after installing the bearings on the crank, i had mike mike take the big case half to his shop and press the crank in.
tonight i pressed the other half on, but i don’t think the crank is completely seated proper.. we’re going to take it to his shop again and make sure it’s pressed in completely. you can see the bit of gap that worries me here;
it should go the rest pretty easily.
i bolted the 13mm intake on (a custom 19mm one is in the works) to keep the reed block from getting messed up kicking around my room, and so that i wouldn’t loose the bolts or anything.
besides, it looks cool!
now i need to finish filing the ports out on the pinasco, polish up the exhaust shoot and bolt the rest together!
it’s coming together! once i have the motor all bolted together in one piece, i can stick it in the frame and figure out the clearance i’ll have for the custom intake. and mike mike can machine the parts for the sweet cdi, and i can order the carb and pipe, the motor will be ready to go!
also, i ordered the stem, bar ends and pedals the other day, and tonight i ordered the bars and the headlight.
the cdi will not have a lighting coil, so i’m going battery powered.
i was lucky to find a niterider minewt.x2 set up for way cheaper than i should have! this is rad, because it’s small, way brighter than your moped’s headlight, and i can transfer it over to my road bikes super quick style when i get unlazy and seattle gets uncrappy out!
ok, that’s it for this update! i have decided to go with paint rather than powder coating the frame and wheels. powder coating would have been tricky with the paint scheme, and it’s probably going to cost a lot less to paint, even if i go pro, but i might just do it in my garage.
it should look rad when it’s done.
tonight i installed the malossi gears in the transmission. i took a crap ton of photos, one for each step, and they are uploading to photobucket right now. there are a lot, and it will take a while to upload them all, so i probably won’t make that post until tomorrow night or something.
but until then, here’s a little mock up of what i have going on so far:
just to give you a little bit of an idea, anyway. nothing is bolted together, and the brick was put on the frame to hold it all together for the photo. haha.
these are the wheels that fred found for me, except he’ll be removing the transmission before he sends them my way. it would be nice to have it, but i have a few down stairs already and it’s not worth the added shipping to send it with.
as lame as it sounds, i might just powder coat these black. i would like to do something less blah, but i’m not sure what i want to do with the rest of the bike yet. in all reality, they will probably sit in my bed room just the way they are until i’m ready to use them, by then i should know what color i’m doing the rest of the frame and have a better idea of what the thing is going to look like.
