Monster trucks beer and other adventures.

So last week there was a monster truck rally and Uphill Battle went. This WICKED SWEET ford was out front. RANCHER edition hahhahahha.

It then came as a sunrise to all of us when Doss drove his van onto the arena floor.

I wish I had a better picture one of the trucks caught on fire which was quite amazing.

It left a nice smoky screen for the rest of the show.

 Ok now to the moped part...

Jimbrah came up from Corvalis and some asshole tagged his headlight.

 Officer Hoffman came over on VD Day and brought his welder. We cut up a shit Biturbo and my Simo Calibrata. It was actually a really easy pipe to make work on the a35.

The headers where pretty much perfect sized once I cut a bit off each and drank a fair amount of beers.

Eric was here trying to fix his bike again. It keeps losing spark. He rewired it we hooked up a new condensor and hi tension coil and set the points, Still nothing.

 Hes bringing over another internal coil today so we can see if that make this thing run again. This bike has been nothing but trouble for him and its mostly been electrical.

Later that night I fired up the Tomos and rode it to The Laws house. I really like the motion pro throttle its buttery smooth and opens that carb so damn quickly.  I forgot to bring my kickstand so we had to keep the bike upright by using some straps. 

 Two six packs and some grinding and welding and we were getting somewhere.

 Steve had a bit of metal around so he cut a square out that was about the same size as the seat post was and got it welded on so that the seat pan could be welded to it.

 Shortly my bike had a seat on it. I am super super happy with how it turned out. the damn thing is so low and its comfortable as hell. I need to jet it and replace some studs. It developed an air leak on the ride home because a cylinder stud was a little stripped. Oooooooh and I forgot the pedals actually work on this one! its pretty amazing but the right pedal arm got nice and bent in Steves vice and it now clears the giant simonini pipe!

Dubs for life and how I get a good idea for the Joemos...

I had some TACOS built up at TREATS and eric needed a new condenser so I ordered him one up and me a set of pegs for the mb5. I also decided to finally put the carbon reeds in the mb5 as well. I work most nights until about 3 am so tonight I got off about 4 am and got home and went to work. Luckily my room mate never wakes up when I am early morning wrenching.
I have yet to take the reed block out of the mb5 yet, until tonight of course. I'm not sure why I was surprised   by how big it actually was, I mean on super bowl sunday I rode trips on this bike for about 5 mniles. No joke that bike ran fine for the most part with three full grown men on it. we did get a few weird looks but whatever. So yeah reed block pre carbon reeds seen here

 I decided to split apart my pinasco engine to check for wear after the couple hundred miles I put on the kit so far. I decided to do a bit more porting and clean up everything I can. I really want to build the Si up Properly.

 Treats sent me this awesome sticker in my latest order.

Metal < Carbon fiber  

In order to work on the Mb5 at 5 am I needed to wheel it into the garage. This bike unfortunately weighs 198 pounds so while it was easy to wheel in I soon realized that it was going to be impossible to turn it around. the wheel base is way long on this thing. After everything I ended up having to back it out up the little ram I made for the few stairs that lead into the garage.

I got these sweet new pegs for the bike. The other pegs I had on there where real big and didnt really fit right so they closed real easy. These heart pegs dont fold and fit perfectly. I added play-doh for added visibilty in the picture of course... well I am gonna get another can of pink for the Joemos race bike, I could always paint the pegs too....

I got the bike as a rolling frame and am pretty happy with most of it. I still need to cut the seat down about three inches and I am not super happy about how the bars look but the make it sit so well that I cant hate them too much. This is with the homoet 4.5 tomos pipe. Its kind of small but i do know it performs well. I thought I might try something different though...

Calibrata meet tomos, I think you two are going to be good friends...

Ignore the puppies they are always trying to steal the attention. By the time I got done screwing around after work it was 7:30 am and light out so I took a few pics. I have some controls coming from treats so I can hook everything up and get this thing tuned and ready to kill it in the race season! I cant wait to dust some puchs on this thing.

24mm mikuni meets tomos or a glimpse at a silly future.

 Since I have a proper space to work on bikes now I have been getting a decent amount done. Most nights I work until 3 or so its hard to wrench outside but now ive been  working in the new battle station on the race tomos. I have a brand new set of pirelli 16x2.75 tires for it. I put them on the poorly painted mags and damn they look good. the picture doesnt  really do it justice. I raced the 2.5 versions of these tires on the C-Word. I love the way the grip. They are super sticky and made in brazil.

the Tomos weakends intake i decided to use after all. I did have to do some modifying to it ti get the 24 m mikuni round slide to fit. I know this intake is made for a 20 mikuni bolt on but the I.D. is supposed to be 24mm. I bolted it up and started filing 

I had this stupid cut up honda seat that was on this frame before I destroyed its last engine. The pad and cover were crap and plus it said HONDA on the back and no self respecting TOMOS rider would allow that.  I pulled the cover off and will put a bit of foam on it and some vinyl or maybe tape depending on how lazy i am about it. 

I am really happy with where everything lined up. Ive got a puch 50 cc head that had been milled down to be a hi comp head. I have an A55 head that is huge but it takes different plugs than all my other bikes so i am using this. I am not really worried about this thing over heating. Im gonna be dumping so much gas through it that its gonna stay nice and cool due to the fact that its blasting so damn fast

Heres a dark blurry 6 am picture of about how its gonna look. I think I am going to cut the seat down about two inches. Im just going to have it welded on because there is no need for it to ever com off really. I might add a cross bar. I did really like having it to lean on in the corners on the C-word. It helped me get into those turns real low and stay on the damn bike. Ive gotta go get some head set bearings from the bicycle store to put the forks on then I can bolt the forks and wheels on and  start tuning. 

I got some mags for SI YOU SOON, I decided if I wanted serious torque  off the line 14 inch mags would be a good idea. its going to be tiny and fast. im gonna try and get Jesse from the Cutters and P-town scooters to make me an intake so I can use the 24 flatslide i have for it because once I get the seals for the forks I can throw the whole thing together and figure out the brakes. I still need to piece together or buy a rear clutch and a belt and Polini variator. I can always do some work and get it running single speed so I can try and get the motor broken in before taking it out on the track. Im pretty excited to see what this motor is going to do. I have yet to see its full potential from the short amount of riding I have done on it so far.

Trusty tri purpose toaster oven. It wouldnt be a shop without it. it heats bearings and cases cooks food and warms the area around the bench its a wonderful thing.

The battle station 2.0 and how to become a baller.

So with the race season rapidly approaching Ive got a lot of work to do. I recently aquired this 2003 Tomos a35 with two alukits and a homoet pipe. It had some serious issues. The exhaust had only one stud. so a massive exhaust leak is an understatement. It also only had one ring on the piston that was on it. I got it home rode it for a few blocks and decided it needed a ton of work. Before I could do anything I needed to clean my garage.

My garage looked like this, mainly thanks to my pack rat room mate.

I wish I had a picture of this bench before it looked as bad as the rest of the garage.

  Very shortly it looked like this and we are ready to wrench.

Officer Hoffman came over today to check out the Battle Station 2.0  and he decided to bring some platinum. The second it was cracked open all lights in the house turned into black lights and all our collars popped up. My teeth also had bling in them after the first sip. I think its all the platinum in the beer that does it. Either was it was too clubbin style for me. I can safely say I wont need to do that again even though it is 6.0 abv and only 137 calories.

The tomos good parts are all going to go on to my old black Joemos frame thats been sitting forever. I did a lot of cutting thanks to Ted from the Cutters bringing his angle grinder over and now my black frame is much smaller.  I need to weld the seat straight to the frame and do some reinforcing but its going to be pretty sweet.  Right now the setup is going to be  A35 motor with my A55 cdi with the ducati unrestricted box A tomos alukit. (im gonna ditch the intake bridge and do some port work on it soon) Bennesar pipe, and a 24 Mikuni round slide carb. I bought a weak ends tomos intake and truthfully im not that happy with it i think Ill have jesse make me one. its just bent poorly the tube they used has been sandwiched pretty much. It looks like it wasnt filled with sand before it was bent.

SI YOU SOON got some new mags today I need to do a lot of work to make em work though. The front brakes are like 105mm which is rad but its just got such a goofy brake stop. I might have to end up going disc on the front. That brings another fucked up part on it. The forks are totally fucked. I need new for tubes pretty much. What sucks is that SI YOU SOON has such odd sized forks. Its a very late model Si with the larger forks. Looks like I will be emailing Angelo to see if he can find em for me. It really sucks that none of the sets of hydraulic forks i have will bolt up to it. Thats the joy of working on a Vespa though I guess.  I really want to make this bike compete in the variated class this year. I am real confident that the Joemos is going to rock the 1/2 speed class. I am  really hoping I can get a Ktm ignition set up for it that and having a 24 mm intake made for my new 24mm flatslide should help a lot. I want to go with the D.E.P.S. cylinder but my pinasco is still barely broken in and I need so much else before I go dropping $300 on another vespa kit.  Lots more to come soon stay tuned for another adventure next week

Snowpedding or how a few hours and mags can make a Tomos magical

I have owned a fairly large amount of tomos mopeds. I have had a tomos tri-rad at one point. I got a free tomos a long time ago and rode it around forever. At one point I got t boned by a car on it so I took the frame from my tomos Tri-rad and bolted all the non ruined stuff from the wrecked frame and made a bike for my then girlfriend. I eventualy traded that tomos (after about 5,000 trouble free miles) for another bike (MMM Derbi anyone?) then after a few years I bought that damn bike back. I rode the shit out of it. crashed it a few times and jumped it off any thing and everything I could. I rode it every where. I put at least another 3,00 miles on it. I then traded it to crusty Eric. He only had a shitty honda express that was at one point stolen spray painted poorly and then recovered. its a sad sad honda express. So he got the Tomos a3. Its got all stock parts other than no airbox and a real old BITURBO with a carb cleaner baffle.
so yeah I trade him this biker and he ends up getting a set of sweet gold mags for it and I helped him rewire it and we got it running pretty good so since it was snowing we rallied the shit out of it even though there were no brake cables hooked up.

With spokes for now...

I love the Tomos font on these old a3 frames. Oh and we didnt have a piston stop handy and needed to clean the points. Rope ftw.

this bike was a tri-rad originally so it never had a kickstand, we borrowed one from Johnny fucker and that plpus screwdriver= this

Hello?

 Here come the mags. We had to do a fair amount of modification to get the TOMOS mags to fit on a TOMOS moped. Really I mean the front wheel took like an hour or more to get set up propperly. The forks even needed a bit of welding on the brake stop to make em real safe. the back was worse. The swing arm on the A3 had a way different brake stop. It had a mushroom shape kid of. well the Tomos a35 mags that eric got needed a brake hub on the swing arm that had no mushroom shape. So eric filed the shit out of his swingarm to make it fit.  The forks on this bike were fairly fucked so Eric rebuilt em and they actually functioned like real forks!

He got the bike to spark after and we got the wiring sorted and noticed some snow outside... hmm what should we do???

 After removing a whole lot of bullshit wires we got the lights to be bright as hell!!

Maybe nine months ago Eric had never ridden a moped and thought they were dumb. This picture just shows how stoked he is about fixing his Tomos. We ran almost a full tank of gas through that bike after he tuned it up, all in the snow mind you. Its a great bike and its good to see it put to good use by some one who is only going to make it better and better.

Other than that I have a 2003 Tomos targa That I just acquired. Its a vintage Uphill Battle bike. Its an A35 with a brand new alukit than I plan on Porting. IM gonna throw on my fantastical magical BENNASAR pipe and a 24 mikuni and see how she does in the races this year. I am  so excited about this bike because I love the Tomos platform and feel like this is really the bike that I can make it shine on. I have my A55 cdi with the unrestricted Ducati box that I am gonna run on it. The Ducati box makes such a huge difference over the stock box. Ive got two Alukits with the bike so Ive got room to explore as far as porting goes.
The Si YOU SOON has a lot coming up. It is got a lot of suprises and good parts going in. If I want to compete in the variated class this year on a SI Im gonna have to make it the fastest Si around.I still need to get some of the parts to make it happen but some are in the mail,  some are in my dreams for now but once its all assembled  shits gonna come together like VOLTRON.

 Oh Yeah My honda MB5 is still pretty much the best bike Ive ever owned. I Love that thing. Ive got some carbon fiber reeds to put in it tomorrow and I might put a pipe on it one day but right now im too in love with the quietness of it.

Oh and this Is Travis and I. Im the shirtless one DUH! he is gonna be the guy behind me this race season... If he isnt too scared to show up. Hi TRAVIS XOXOXOOXOXOOXOXO(OXO I had fun playing pinball with you.