i’ve started pulling ciaociao apart to get it ready for the next polini race.
apparently i’ve been running around with a huge head leak and i had no idea. i guess i should have looked under my bike, the motor is covered in oil! the nuts holding the head on were like hand tight? no idea how that happened. oh wait! i just realized i bet it’s because my triple layer of base gaskets compressed! doi. that’s why you use metal to make thick base gaskets, kids.
everything’s looking good inside the motor. the 3rd mount on the case snapped off again. it broke right along the weld ray did for me. nate says he can do a better job, so hopefully it’ll be fine after that.
also, the aluminum spacer i was using to keep my fan rivets from dragging on my ktm50 coils wore itself out and i have some wear showing. it’s because, even when super tight, my fan will slip a tiny bit when i really get on the gas. the torque is just too much for it. rather than replacing the spacer with a steel one, i just took a big punch and hammered the back of all the rivets flat. it clears nicely. lucky for me, the rivets didn’t do any serious damage to the coils. just some grooves in the plastic.
you can see the flattened rivets there.
sorry for the dark photos, i’m at motomatic using their camera and the light is low.
tony will be around next week and he’s going to help me figure out the best plan of action for this kit and then i’ll get started cutting stuff up.
also, i’m going to try and get some forks on the way for the ciao before next race. i do want to eventually finish my mod to the stock forks and run those, but i don’t have the time right now.. i still gotta get magnomos back on the road by september 11th!
anyway, in the meantime, i plan to run the vespa ebrs. they are pretty stiff and should work well for the track, at least better than these pogo stick bravo forks i’ve been running.
that’s it for now. more posts and pictures soon to come! and maybe a video? who knows!
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!
well i got the exhaust port pretty much finished and milled 1mm off the top of the cylinder, there is much more to be done to this kit before i’m done hacking at it, but i am out of time. atwater #3 is this weekend!
expect some kind of write up on the weekend and some pictures, and some more details to what i’ve done to poor ciaociao once i get back.
well, firstly, the 2nd race went really well. i chopped two seconds off my lap time, and while i placed 6th in both races, i was faster and rode much better than the first race and i’m stoked on that!
if you want to read a better write up, check out the hry website. it’s still being worked on a lot, so it doesn’t really look all that great, but there’s rad photos and stuff over there.
on to ciaociao.
i decided to start playing with the porting in my pinasco. i haven’t really jumped into hacking at it just yet, but cuffs and i made a port map of it and did some measurements and i think i have a plan.
my map only shows one of the transfer ports because i’m going to focus on the exhaust port for now.
i’ve always known the exhaust port in this kit was pretty weak, so i’m going to be opening it up some and probably lifting the whole cylinder a bit and mill the difference off the top.
i’m still trying to work out what i’m going to do exactly, and the next race is coming up pretty quick so i gotta get on it. once the math is over and i start milling and hacking at it i’ll be sure to get a bunch of pictures for yous guys.
until then!
Filed under: brakes, carb, cdi, dellorto, electronics, fail!, intake, new parts!, port timing
since my last update i’ve gotten a few things taken care of. firstly, i took care of the rear brake.
i have never had a moped with crappy brakes, especially the rear. i know the front does most of the stopping, but all of my bikes have always had awesome rear brakes, like skid worthy. i was a little disappointed in ciaociao’s rear brake hardly slowing me down even.
i pulled the rear end apart to sand the pad and see if there was anything i could do to make it work better, when i remembered i had a kinetic rear hub floating around. i dug it out and discovered the brake pad on it was over twice as wide as the stock ciao pad!
here you can see the stock pad compared to the kinetic pad, which i had already mounted in this picture;
the kinetic one is probably a third bigger than my “large” vespa pad from my si that got saturated in gear oil. totally found another good thing about kinetics! can you believe it?
after mounting it, i got it all sanded and ready to use, and threw a new pedal sprocket on with fewer teeth for good measure.
it works awesome now! skid city!
i also fixed my flywheel fan for the last time, i hope!
i made a new spacer on the lathe, only this time i gave it a cheek for the fan to rest on. i pretty much re-created the same spacer from last time, but left it a super thin shelf for the back of the fan.
then i chucked the fan itself up in the lathe and turned out a step for the spacer’s shelf to fit into.
here they are side by side;
and put together;
poured on the 4000lb test glue and it works perfectly! no more fan falling into my expensive coils!
speaking of expensive coils, after installing the new set and putting the bike back together, i wasn’t getting any spark at all. took the bike all the way apart again to discover my coils were faulty. either they came that way, or i some how broke them while installing them.. at any rate, i thought i was up a creek.
after calling around to literally 20+ ktm dealers in my area, i finally found on that had one in stock! it ended up costing me a good deal more than the other coils, but the ones i got are true made-in-italy ktm50 coils, not after market knock-offs like the last two sets i had and broke. the actual ktm coils are way better quality and totally worth the extra money.
i put the new new coils in last night, cut and bent up a lever choke for my phbg so it would fit, and it fired right up. it was about 11p and i got yelled at by the neighbor, so i put it away for the night. i started in on tuning today and discovered i have an air leak at the intake plate i made, but i have a few ideas to fix that pretty easy. for the meanwhile, i’m going to be slapping on the black rtv and get to tuning!
she’s almost ready to rip!!
ciaociao 