I will start with an apology. I tried to craft a reader base and that requires frequent, preferably weekly new posts. I have not held up my end of the bargain. Been so busy actually doing the thing I haven’t had time to talk about me doing the thing. I still don’t, spoiler alert, but I will write this teaser post about the stuff I’ve been working on as an overview and I promise I will deep dive into all of it once I’ve tested it.
So as I eluded to before I’m going to the big moped dance. I am also helping the Spicy Boys Race Team with building them a motor/drive train for their hobbit. We will be bringing three bikes: a stock class Tomos A55, and two variated class hobbits. Let’s talk about the hobbits a little.
So years ago, I built a Malossi themed raffle bike for the first Moped GP in California. The bike was actually the Wooly Bullies old raffle bike I acquired. They put a hobbit subframe on a Austro Daimler Puch with a Malossi H2O kit and it was a great idea. Inspired by Terry Dean’s VX4 bike build for the Polini Cup I chose to put a moby crank in the hobbit case and run a rear scooter clutch pulley. It turned out great and the owner still races the bike in the east coast. But that bike was built under duress and seat of my pants engineering and I have much better tech at my disposal these days. So when my current race hobbit found Jesus one afternoon riding around town I used it as an excuse to update the design of the Malossi bike. My plan was to build the crank conversion in such a way that it only requires modifying the case and then a simple adapter to allow me to use unmodified moby ignitions and variators. I also designed and built a new type of reed adapter to use minarelli horizontal scooter reed so I could use off the shelf intakes. I modified the cases to use standard seals as well. I also built the stuff to run a minarelli input into the rear transmission. It’s a lot. Since I had to do all that setup to machine all these parts I went ahead and built spares of everything. Which I used to build another motor for the Spicy Boys bike.
Now, I actually finished my bike last year, then promptly seized the motor because I was being dumb. So I just got the new motor running about 2 weeks ago and tuning has been tricky. I’ve yet to finish the second motor until I confirmed the first works as intended in case I need to do different port timings, compression, ect.. I would rather only blow on motor instead of two basically. I think I have almost unlocked the secrets of it’s power but I will find out this weekend when I get some different carb parts. Until then it’s waiting with violent intent.
The Tomos stock class racer is coming along nicely. Everything is working great so far. The tubeless tire conversion worked (although I don’t know if I can recommend it until I ride it, there is a chance it can still pop off the bead under cornering), the transmission lightening is done, the cartridge emulator conversion for the forks is done, chain has been waxed in PTFE and parafin, among some other things. The only major thing that remains is porting the cylinder and decking the head then final assembly. Tuning will be very similar to my daily tomos that I’ve written about before so I’m not worried about it. Unlike the hobbit that is all custom machining and a carb I’ve never used before throwing me curve balls over and over.
Anyways, there is 2 weeks to go, I’ve got one bike assembled but not really rideable yet, another hobbit motor to finish so they can build their whole bike, and a whole tomos to assemble from as many pieces as you can tear a bike down to. So don’t be surprised if I don’t have time to update any until after the race. Once I know all this stuff works, or doesn’t, then I’ll go into great length and detail into the results. I have some other plans and projects to talk about too, but time is sparse so be patient and I’ll make it worth it. Maybe!