well, i apologize for promising you a rad update and then never delivering it. what a jerk i can be sometimes.
i just moved into a new place and am trying to get everything squared away. that, plus working on mopeds for motomatic, developing crazy race tech for next year’s polini cup and having a super slightly more active social life due to the move into midtown sacramento have left this poor ciao blog neglected for far too long.
nate, rafter and i are just about to head to a machine shop, though, so hopefully tonight once i get home i can finally show you some pictures from the last polini cup and talk about things to come for little ciaociao.
soon my pretties, soon
so remember how i said i was working on stuffing a 24mm mikuni carb into my ciao frame? well i pretty much gave up on that idea.
thanks to tony s., i was able to bust out a super nice intake plate to get the carb bolted up to the motor without much trouble.
problem is, there is no room for the carb in the frame!
i would have to loose the pedals all together and chop a huge chunk out of my frame to make it fit in there, and i’m not about to do either of those things.
there might still be a 24mm carb in the future for ciaociao, but it will be a smaller carb that will fit in the bike easier. no need to cut up the frame for a mikuni when there’s other, smaller carbs that will get the job done just as well!
polini cup 5 post coming soon! with pictures!
i can’t find my damn camera!
the next race is two weeks away and i’ve got some things going on. bigger carb, fixing my pipe, new not-sticky throttle. some lame little stuff and some rad big stuff.
i’ll see what i can do about getting photos!
after this last race, i don’t plan on really riding this thing much for a while, so i think it’s time to tear it down and finally paint the fucker. i’ve said that before, though, so we’ll see.
tommy’s been waiting forever for me to paint my wheels.
so this weekend was a total bust. none of the other hry kids could go racing, and it left me with no ride. it was a little too last minute for me to cobble something together, so i decided to have a drunk weekend at the shop in seattle hating atwater. it was a shitty weekend.
on top of not getting to go, i some how misplaced/dropped in the street my wallet, containing $300 cash, my id and both my debit cards.
but hey! this isn’t a blog about my life, it’s a blog about ciaociao! so enough of that shit!
poor ciaociao did not see the race track this weekend like it really wanted to. i did, however, take it for a few rides!
now, i haven’t really ridden ciaociao in the street since la rally, just on the track, and i was riding around with slow bikes rather than race bikes, so it’s really hard for me to judge what kind of performance gains i might have obtained with my exhaust porting. i was really hoping to get a feel for that on the track. ah well!
however, now that racing is done until september, i think it is time for me to pull that cylinder back off and finish up my porting. larger transfers, two new transfers, and more work on the exhaust. plus i still need to mill the other 1mm off the top of the cylinder and build the 2mm spacer to lift the whole thing up. and i really want to work the head, the pinasco head seems kinda crappy for how rad that kit can be.
so yeah! hopefully after i do all of this the thing will still run and will be competitive next atwater!
in the meantime, my actual race bike build is now underway, but that has nothing to do with anything here, so i’ll not talk about it much. you can catch pictures of it every now and again on my mopedsmofun tumblr photo blog if you’re interested!
oh boy, back to the dremmel!
sorry i haven’t been doing better keeping you guys up to date, it’s been super crazy lately!
i am supposed to be working on the 77 blog right now, so i’ll keep this short and give you more info later with lots of rad pics.
day one in la was a success, but then my variator exploded and ciaociao was down for the rest of the weekend.
after la i threw my polini variator on and took it to the races. it ran awesome and we took 3rd in both heats! yeah!
anyway, sorry for the short update. i will post more later and get some photos up.
man, i don’t know what i did wrong, but the moped karma gods aren’t too stoked on me right now.
firstly, the 4130 was backordered forever. like a couple weeks. it finally showed up and loverboy ian went to pick it up. later on i got this email from him:
So, it turned out that even though there were four of us at the shop when we ordered the 4130, we ended up all agreeing we wanted 2.5 inch outer diameter when really what we had in mind was 1.5 inch outer diameter. I don’t know how it happened, the dangers of group think I guess, or the shops malfunctioning calipers. 2.5 inch is REALLY BIG much too big for a support bar, unless you want your support bar to act as an auxiliary gas tank.
There was a little bit of 1.5 inch at the shop already, enough for my moped and maybe one more. I am going to order another 8 feet of 1.5 inch to replace what I used and for you’re bikes and it’ll be another 40$ or so for the complete length. Online Metals doesn’t do returns so it’ll be another $14 a person for the new bar.Ian
such a bummer. so my options are to spend even more money on new steel for the cross bar (making this a $50 cross bar), or just say fuck a cross bar and do without.
if this were any other moped i would probably say screw it, but if you know ciaos you know how flexy they are, so i think i’m going to have to drop more money on the damn thing.
oh well. it looks like i have two feet of 2.5″ od 4130 tubing to do something with someday.
Filed under: fail!
well, seattle is covered in more snow than it’s seen in forever, so everything is shut down or broken or both.
i haven’t really had much of a chance to get any work done on ciaociao.
naz is getting ready to order up some chromoly for another project, so i’m going to just order a tube for my cross bar, rather than cut up a bicycle frame. plus the guy who shares naz’ shop space builds bicycle trailers and customizes bicycle frames for a living, and he’s got water bottle braze-ons galore, so i’ll just braze my own on. that will be a lot easier than finding a bicycle with the tubing size i want that i can just cut up.
i’m not exactly sure when this is going to happen, but we are ordering the steel for the other project hopefully in the next couple weeks, so hopefully not too long!
i have a frame on the way!
i have the motor back in my hands, all welded up and ready to go!
i have also broken the display on my digital camera! NOOO!
i am watching a few auctions on ebay of broken cameras that are the same as mine to use as parts, hopefully i’ll be able to pick one up cheap and fix mine.
i did manage to get some photos of the case that my friend ray welded up for me!
here it was before, broken in the frame.
here it is after ray was done with it.
he did a great job! i’ll bet that chunk is stronger now than it was before i broke it!
anyway, the frame should show up soon. expect things to pick up around here once it does!
at the creature rally ciaociao was taken down by a rental van. more about that later. let me get you up to speed before that story.
last update was after i destroyed my fan (again) at moped monday, which actually lead to a pretty good soft seize. the piston was smeared over the rings!
i was able to pick the dike ring out of the top grove with no issues, the ring was perfectly fine.
the second ring, however, was a bit more buried. after probably fortyfive minutes of picking at the thing, the ring was finally starting to wiggle and come out.. in my excitement i broke the damn thing. bummer.
with the rings out, i was able to clean up the piston with some 400 grit sandpaper and clean up the ring grooves as good as new.
problem was, i was down one ring.. and no pinasco kits in the country.
so i went through all the polini kits i had at the shop and find one with a ring of the same width and height! only it was a bit bigger around. after probably 40 more minutes of filing with a tiny pencil file, checking every now and again with the cylinder and feeler gauges, i was able to whittle the ring down to proper size, and even hand filed some notches in it to clear the stop peg!
the cylinder cleaned up with hardly any work and i was ready to go.
i really wish i had taken pictures of all of that, but i had left my camera at home some how, and didn’t want to wait.. it’s too bad, i was actually quite proud of myself for finding a close enough ring and hand filing it to fit. it’s been running perfect with that ring ever since!
as mentioned before, that moped monday ride destroyed my plastic tfr fan.
lucky for me, i had an extra one found on moped army, so i went back to mikemike’s to once again lathe out the back of the fan and figure out a better way to attach it.
what i came up with is so simple, i hate myself for not going this rout to begin with.
pop rivets!
i used a lot of them to make sure they had enough grab to keep from tearing out of that plastic. i used 1/8″ alum rivets to clear the coils underneath, so the heads were pretty small. so far it’s holding strong, and i’ve got a lot of miles on it!
i forgot to re-time the motor before throwing it back together. i didn’t think it would have untimed it’s self, but i was going to do it anyway. too bad i didn’t, it was running like ass the night before leaving to sf and i didn’t have time to mess with it. first thing i did when i got to cali was pull the motor and time it. ran awesome once it was back together!
so ciaociao did most of day one without a hitch, it was blasting pretty freaking hard for never being open more than 1/2 throttle.
then came the night city ride. i probably got about 6 miles before the inside nut on my clutch decided to spin off, taking most of the threads with it.
i didn’t notice until i felt a loss of power. i looked behind me to make sure i wouldn’t be cutting anyone off as i merged to the right, and that’s when i noticed all the smoke..
when i looked at the clutch, it was BILLOWING a TON of smoke out of the bell! way more than at blood drive when this exact thing happened! it was also shooting a ton of sparks, what with the inner pulley cheek now resting against the frame..
so i pulled over and waited for the rescue truck.
the next day, i went to rufu’s work shop and he welded the fucker up!
i won’t be getting that yellow malossi spring back, but it won’t be falling apart on me anymore, either!
so now that i have that all taken care of, ciaociao was ready for the long, awesome sunday ride.
other than a few little hiccups (clutch bell nut nearly fell off, belt stretching making it hard to start), the bike was running awesome.
i flew across the golden gate bridge at half throttle (wanted to open up all the way, but decided i would wait for the trip home, didn’t want to blow up before the awesome ride!), was ripping up every hill, passing bikes left and right.. so much fun!
until i went into a semi-steep, super sharp right hand blind corner, hit a patch of pine needles/dirt/something and had the bike slide out from under me, into the oncoming lane and under a van.
CRUNCH!, the bike stopped running..
i rushed over, dragged it out of the street and up the inside wall as best as i could and waited for all the other mopeds to go by. once they had, i dragged it to the next driveway a little way up the street and waited for the pick up truck again. fuck.
the frame is toast.
it could have been a lot worse, i could have been ran over with the bike, but some how i lucked out.
poor ciaociao did not! sad.
the pipe now has a few dents in it, i snapped the 3rd mounting point off the malossi case and broke another float bowl, but other than that everything seems fine.. there is some oil on my tranny, but that might be from the over-flow hole from when it was on it’s side. i need to tear into it and inspect it better.
so the ciao’s off the road again. lamecity. i’ve been trying super hard to not cut up green ciao to make ciaociao v2.0, but it’s sooo tempting.. currently i’m searching for a new frame so that i don’t have to destroy a beautiful stock ciao to satisfy my burn-out-wheelie cravings!
ciaociao will be back, and soon. so keep watching this space!
the stock clutch springs made all the difference! i was easy on the throttle and the thing was still ripping tonight! i have the jetting pretty close at 96 main and 50 idle, my 7 needle is one down from the top (three up). i think i might go with a 97 or 98 main, though.. it’s not lean, but it could be a little more rich for a new kit.
ps, this moped vibrates the shit out of my ass!
however, with all that good news comes the bad news. i fouled out at a light and while checking the plug i noticed the motor was pretty hot.. i turn the crank over with the variator and noticed the fan didn’t turn with it. FAN BROKE AGAIN! GAH!
i haven’t had a chance to pull it a part to see what’s going on, but hey, my new spacer kept the fan from taking out my coils! yay!
while i have it apart i think i’ll pull the top end apart and just give it a look. it didn’t seize on me, but i want to make sure it didn’t take any heat damage or anything.
if i get extra brave, maybe i’ll start on a little porting on it.. but i dunno, i think i should hold off till after the rally.
SO MUCH FUN TO RIDE!
