So I last night I felt like tinkering with the Tomos…

Toward the end of last year I couldn’t seem to get the Tomos to idle correctly, I suspected air leak and I didn’t really want to tear the engine apart since it was my only running moped at the time. This winter I made that leakdown tester and got rid of all my air leaks. Once things warmed up I retuned my carb since fixing all of the air leaks caused the engine to be running rich. I thought I had the problem solved, but sure enough it still wouldn’t idle for shit. Back to square one.

I figured I’d recheck the timing though I could have sworn that I’ve already double/triple checked it in the past. Since it has a puch polini kit on it I try to shoot for 1.2mm btdc. When I checked it it turns out that I was running just a hair btdc, like .2mm or something. No wondering it was running like crap, I’m surprised it idled at all. Reset the timing to 1.2mm.

While I was at it I figured I’d mess around with my clutches a bit so I drained the transmission and pulled the cover.  I’ve had a little bit of a rattling clanking sound for a while now so I set out to see if I could fix that problem as well. The first thing I noticed was that my sprag return springy thing was missing from the back of my intermediary gears, there were no remnants of it floating around in the transmission so I figured it was one of those deals where I had taken the engine apart and promptly forgot all about it. I stole one off of a spare A3 I’m rebuilding since it’s the same part. Lot’s of people run without them who knows how long I have, but I figured I’d replace it to see if it helped at all.

Countershaft Return Spring or “Sprag”

So onto the clutches, from what I’ve read having loose/unbalanced clutches is the usual culprit when it comes to rattling/clanking sounds on a Tomos. Upon inspection my clutch padding has seen better days, looks like a rat has been nibbling on them. That’s going to have to wait to be fixed, I have a spare set of shoes that I’m going to have a brake shop reline so that’ll be dealt with then, but at this point I’ll chalk them up as ‘unbalanced’.

The next thing I did was pull the springs out of the clutches and put in some heavier ones. About a year ago I picked up a set of green(stockish), a set of blue(20lb), and a set of red(30lb) springs. I haven’t tried any of them out yet for the same reason mentioned above. I figured I’d go straight for the 30lb springs, go big or go home right?

Tomos ‘red’ 30lb spring

Before installing the springs though on the first gear clutch there is a clawed discy looking thing that provides some tension to secure the clutch shoes tightly on the clutch assembly. I’m not sure of the actual name of the thing, but I have it circled in the image below.

Clutch Tensioner Thing

I watched a youtube video of someone placing shims underneath theirs to step their clutch from making clacking noises. I figured I’d skip the shims and just try bending the ‘teeth’ of the tensioner slightly so that the shoes fit a little bit more snuggly.

After that it was time to install the springs, what a pain. I used a combination of 3 vice grips and a bunch of flathead screwdrivers to get them on. Next time I do it I’m going to try and do a video as I think it might be pretty helpful.

Now I’ve gotten everything put back together time to refill the fluid. I’ve experimented with different fluids and viscosities and I’m kinda of in the camp of using something relatively light weight. Let the engine rev up faster by providing less resistance with the oil and use the springs and weight of the clutch shoes to control the engagement. So I’m running Mobile1 Ow-20W oil.

It was late and I didn’t want to piss off my neighbors last night so no time to test things out.

Hopefully no more clacking noises and easy idling are in my future…..

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Before you go “woah wait a sec a top tank kromag conversion! nobody’s ever done one of those!” #sarcasm. I don’t have a top tank ped yet so I feel that it’s kosher.

It’s literally cobbled together from several different bikes. I’m gonna try and leave this one a little ratty since I always seem to find something I want to grind, hack, weld after everything is painted nice.

Core Bike Stuff

• JC Penny Pinto2 Frame w/ fence post crossbar
• Kawasaki KX80 Forks, Disc Caliper & Wheel
• Trail Tech Vector
• 1963 Montgemery Wards Riverside Tank
• Front Brake Control off of the treats disc brake setup
• 21mm Dellorto PHBG
• 38 tooth rear sprocket

I’ve got two engine setups for it as well my other puch is my wife’s so I don’t really mess with it. So I figured I’d go nuts with this one. I’ve got an E50 setup as well as a ZA50.

E50 Setup

-80cc airsal kit (46mm single ring piston), Case Matched
-Airsal Head
-Lightened main gear via Maize Diffley
-3 Shoe Clutch
-Blue Clutch Springs
-Motion Left Mopeds Clutch Brace
-Treats CDI
-1977 Stuffed Teflon Crank
-All new bearings and seals
-Hacked up boss pipe
-16 Tooth Front Sprocket

I have a proma circuit pipe for the setup, but it’s going to need a little bit of modification to fit, the fins on the airsal kit are just too big.

ZA50 Setup

-80cc Metrakit
-Metrakit Head
-MLM Rev Run
-Treats CDI
-20 Tooth Front Sprocket

I probably would have run this setup first, but the metrakit has a slight hairline crack in the skirt of the cylinder. I figured it be best to have it fixed first since I don’t feel like making it into a boat anchor right away. So the E50 it is! I figured if I ran a rear sprocket somewhere between 38-40 Tooth it should match up pretty good to both engine setups.

Right now I’m just finishing up the wiring, then on to setting the timing and finishing up with jetting the carb. I made a cardboard mockup of the seat I want to use with it and Tyler Augustine is slapping together a fiberglass version of it.

I’m pretty excited about it, I’m hoping I get to hear the bike run tonight!

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The easiest thing to do is just press out the brass bushing in the connecting rod and push in a new one off a a stock Puch crank. One thing to note, the brass bushing setup is really only good up to 8500 rpms, if you’re gonna run faster then that you’ll need to have a new connecting rod pressed into your crank that can made use of a needle bearing.

Both 1977Mopeds and Treats sell the Puch brass bushings if you’re having trouble finding one.

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I’d like to do away with the cardboard and run a head without decomp so I picked up a cheap chinese pocketbike pull start. I just did some googling and picked one that looked like it would do the trick. I forget the site that I bought it off of,but the description was that it was a GS Moon pull start that works on many other 50cc engines.

Once I got the pull start in my hands I came up with a plan for how I was going to mount it to the moped. Here’s the result…

For reference the 11mm x 1.0 nut i used on the pawl is Toyota Part # 90179-11017

Total cost of this project was around $30

Special Thanks to TJ Prefontaine and the Weak Ends for the inspiration for this project!

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Here’s some samples of her handy-work…

Sunday Morning Motors

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A little bit of leakdown testing, Kim’s hobbit engine was air tight, Brian’s Gila E50 not so much. Jimbo did some porting on his Motobecane AV10 Polini setup (that thing is going to be nuts!). Jed did some chopping grinding and painting.

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A little bit of TLC for the Tomos

In my previous post you saw I had a suspicion that my tomos had an air leak so I built a leakdown tester. Much of the leak was coming right out of the spark plug hole so I chased the threads with one of these thread chaser thingys and it worked like a charm, no more leaks. I’m sure I’ll have some carb tuning todo in the spring, but it’s hardly worth working on now while it’s so cold out.

Next up I decided to upgrade the front forks with some suzuki K10 forks for a cheap hydro setup. If I had to do it again I’m sure I could do it faster, but it’s a lot of tweaking to get them working on a Tomos. For starters the head tube on a tomos is pretty long, I removed the top cup from the head tube using a headset cup removal tool. Then I cut the head tube down using a sawzall right where the weld is on the top of the tube. The diameter of the tube is about 2mm narrower below the weld so I used a lathe and made the cup a little smaller.

The forks are setup to use 3/4″ handlebars so I had to dremel them out a little bit to use the 7/8″ M bars I picked up. The eyelets needed to be widened out a little bit in order to take a 12mm axle, I did this using a 15/32″s drill bit and since these forks are wider I had to pick up a new axle. I have to tweak the spacers a little bit before I call it finished. I believe it’s recommended to use a 5mm spacer on the brake side and a 14mm spacer on the other side.

I made a little plate that mounts on the top of the triple tree to hold my trail tech, I think it works out quite well. I also made a little mount for the speedo magneto sensor and welded it to the bottom of one of the struts. It’s fine for now, but my wheel is actually on backwards, the brake stop is on the wrong side, it’s easy enough to swap the struts and flip the wheel, but I’ll need to relocate the sensor when that happens.

Trail Tech Vector mounted on M Bars

If I had to do it again I think I might go for some kx80 forks, they’re longer in the triple tree department, they’re lighter, and you’ve got the option of running a disk brake. I’m thinking it would be less work.

Pinto Top Tank Project

I’ve got a pinto that I’ve been work on from time to time as well, this one did get a set of kx80 forks, they’re very awesome. I’ve shortened them around 5-6 inches by chopping down the springs and moving them over to the rebound side of things as shown in this picture

I also have a gas tank off a a 60s Montgomery Wards Riverside/ Beneli Fireball that I’ll be using on it.

The first thing I wanted to do with the tank is to cut out the existing petcock connection, it was an odd size and switch to something more common  and easy to get cheap petcocks for. I decided to go with a Harley Davidson Petcock since they used the same 22mm petcock from 1975 to 1995 so without too much searching you can get them for around $10, so I picked up a bung and took out the existing petcock adapter with a 7/8″ holesaw bit. I have some pinholes in the tank as well, it’s pretty rusty so I figured while I braze the bung on I’ll also fill in some of the holes. This is the first time I’ve tried brazing with a MAPP gas torch, it doesn’t work the greatest, but it worked well enough to get the job done.

Note: The tank has sat empty of fuel for many years and I derusted and flushed the crap out of it, before I took the torch to it.

Since I’ll be using clip ons instead of standard handlebars on this one I’m going to be mounting my trail tech using the handlebar bracket on the top of the triple tree. Other then that I’m waiting on some new seals so I can finish those forks up and move on to other things.

Motobecane Pull Start

I picked up a pull start for a GS Moon pocket bike to use on the motobecane. They’re fairly inexpensive  around $15. This will allow me to do away with bump starting and I should be able to ditch/plug my decomp. I’ll post more on this once I start working on it.

Swinger Ignition Troubleshooting

My wife’s bike cuts out at around 30mph, I think it’s either a bad ground, ignition coil or cdi. This should be too bad, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

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