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’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!
finally made it to mikemike’s shop with the ciao frame and did some chopping and welding.
i haven’t done any welding in years, and this was pretty much my first time brazing (i did some way back in middle school, i think.. way too long ago to remember though), but i’m pretty happy with how it all turned out! i need to clean up the brazing big time, but that was to be expected. it looks like ass right now, haha.
pictures!
stock ciao frame.
off goes the kickstand brackets!
i also cut off about 32mm from the top of the frame where the seat tube slides in to drop the seat down some, and i drilled out the spot welds and chiseled off the tire pump mounts.
the welds turned out alright. not perfect, but they’ll get the job done for sure.
and that there is my sloppy ass brazing job. i am going to go over it all with a file and probably a dremmel to get it nice and smooth, so it’s alright that it’s all blobby and pooly for now.
i also welded a couple washers into the seat post to keep it from squishing closed and causing the seat to go floppy. it’s hard enough to hold on to this bike when it takes off, i don’t need a floppy seat trying to dump my butt onto the rear tire..
i didn’t get any photos of the seat this time around, once mikemike drops it and the frame off at the shop i’ll snap some quick ones to show you what i mean.
i still have some cutting to do to the frame (carb clearance), and some more welding and brazing if i decide to put the cross bar in, but otherwise it’s just about ready to go to isaac’s for a good sand blasting! then it’s primer and paint time!
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: frame
you all may be happy to know that today i ordered up a nice, stiff rod of 4130 for my top tube!
i should have it by week’s end, and sunday is a planned fun day down at the machine shop for me and ciaociao!
exciting times are here at last! stay tuned!
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.
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!
sorry for the dead air.. i thought i had a new ciao frame lined up, but i haven’t heard anything in a while. lame.
i did get a friend to weld the broken mount on the case back on, i should have the motor back in my hands in the next few days. i’ll have pictures up as soon as i get it.
i don’t think i have 100 miles on this poor thing yet.. jeez.
soon, though. i just need to locate a frame.
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!
so, if you’ll remember from last time, i mentioned my clutch smoking a bunch and my fan falling apart again.
well, the clutch thing ended up being the nut on the very back spinning loose. i sheered the lock washer that was to hold it in place and it spun off. once that happened, everything was all loosey goosey and caused all the smoke and heat. it’s all better now, new lock washer installed with a dab or two of red loctite, and i should be good to go back there. i hope..
however, the fan falling off ended up being a real problem. it took out my cdi!
the fan fell into the coils and melted away at them till i broke some wires. melted the back of the fan a bit, too.
not a big deal. besides, when you’re trying something new for the first time, you’re bound to run into problems like this. i picked up some new coils pretty cheap on ebay and am working on a new adapter/spacer plate for the fan. it will be stepped as such so that the fan cannot fall backwards into the coils again, and it will provide me with more surface area for gluing it together.
i really hope to have the fan thing sorted out this weekend some time. it’s all most rally time again and i haven’t gotten to even begin the actual tuning part of this moped. 
oh! and here’s a photo to show you how much cutting i had to do to the frame to get the carb to work. i also had to take a razor blade to the plastic float bowl! it’s a tight fit!
