Here are a few pics from recent progress…

I’ve been working on trying to get it as “together” as possible, all trim, bodywork and stuff, before putting the floor bars on to get the best idea of how to do them. I think now I know what I’m supposed to be doing and now just have to actually get them in. Hopefully I’ll get into that this week, weather permitting.

The back rides up when there’s no weight on it which makes it look a little odd, but when you’re on it, it all lays flat and lines up right.

The last pic is with me sat on it as you can hopefully see  then both the rear mudguard and the exhaust come into alignment. It’s very, very long for a scooter but looks to be headed the sort of direction I was hoping (japanese “big scooter” style).

This bike is weird – I don’t actually know what the final result will be but I have some oddly specific parameters. I know it will be red and black (wasn’t sure why). I know it will be as long as is really feasible. and low.  I know it’s going to be fast (-ish for a scoot). It doesn’t need to be a daily driver so anything goes really engine-wise.

What I didn’t expect is that it would feel so balanced. Admittedly this is only from moving it around working on it and manouvering for the pics but still.  It’s heavy but the centre of gravity is super-low even when it’s jacked up with no user on.  Once you’re on it will drops a bit further still. Sat on it, It feels like some sort of rocket sled/mental-scooters-of-the-apocalypse type thing rather than “sit up and beg” like normal scoots.

I put it on the bike stand on where the old front engine mount was which is a curved surface (the tags) vs a flat surface (the bike stand) and it sits almost perfectly balanced. It’s quite heavy but it feels really quite good.

I’ve built a lot of random and not always that sensible stuff in my time making things and unlike some of those experiments this doesn’t feel shonky at all. It’s like the opposite – I keep looking at it in semi-disbelief of what it’s becoming. and I think we have some of the best bits to do yet.

 

The 50cc is also just a starting point. It’ll get tuned and likely replaced at some point. I may have found ‘a guy’ who can make ‘scarily fast scooters’ which sounds like exactly what I’m looking for so I’m hoping he can bless this beasty with his magic touch once she’s at that point since I have almost 0 XP with 2-strokes like this.

I’d like to keep it 2 stroke but maybe find a 2-stroke 125cc and get it tuned, or add a second 50cc cylinder since it has the spare width for one. A tuned 100cc twin cylinder would probably be terrifying.

We have a lathe of sorts and a tig welder though so why not? 2strokestuffing on youtube has an SPX 50cc with ~20 hp. Even half of that would be rather fun. It’s a lot of work but it’s been done

I’ve had to ditch the air-ride for the moment because it wasn’t carrying the weight of the rider as well as I’d have liked, which turned out to be a geometry issue in the end anyway. It’s something we’ll be coming back to – the bike layout expects to need air tanks and there will be gaps otherwise, plus it’s cool as fuck being able to raise and drop it. air and air tanks are part of the design, though having the choice of where to put them after everything else is no bad thing.

As it turns out even with normal shocks with that flat angle it needed two of them, one from a yamaha Vity 125 plus the original neos shock. (Shout out to JordanHut on ebay for going above and beyond with helping me find a shock which worked 🙂 Hit him up for all your random scooter projects )

 

 

full build thread on scootershack.co.uk