First off, a little about Bing carburetors: I used to hate them. Like really hate them. I’m not sure why that is, I guess when I first started working on mopeds I had a bike with a Dell’Orto SHA and my brother had a bike with a Bing and his carb was in rough shape so comparatively I just preferred the nicer of the only two carbs I’d ever taken apart.

Well, after spending the last two years honing my skills as one of the finer Garelli mechanics in the USA, I’ve started working on more Puch bikes and let me tell you: the honeymoon is over between me and Dell’Orto. After seeing how simple getting a Bing carburetor to idle was, I seriously considered converting my Itialian mopeds over to Bing.

So now, let’s get to the meat of this post:

When I took the carb apart on this bike, the little mixture needle and special little circle clip were missing. Just as I discovered this, Gabe Bandit showed up at my house. We grilled some hot dogs and I said “hey can a Bing carb run without a mixture needle?” Gabe said “no”, then added “why, do you need one?” Gabe had a needle, but not the little circle clip. Bummer.

Well dear readers, I’m not made of money, so I decided to go the DIY route once again. I took apart the carb on Power Animal Beau’s bike, and used the needle clip to make a stamped image of the clip. Then I scoured the house for something made of metal that would be a suitable thickness. 

I have a 3-month old baby in my house, and she drinks this special high-calorie formula for runts. she burns through about a dozen of these little bottles a day and each one has a metal lid. Stainless, and the perfect thickness! I used a pair of heavy duty scissors to cut the outer diameter, but the inside was too intricate to cut with scissors, and the metal is too thick to cut with an exacto knife. so I used a micro drill bit and my dremel to slowly router out the inner shape. 

SUCCESS!

After seeing all the cool stuff that Gabe Bandit and Responsible John have been doing with their blogs about building mopeds, I decided that with my next build I would finally record in every detail how I go about building a prize-winning moped.

My current financial situation being broke, I decided to build a loaner bike for when friends come over to ride with me. I started out with this J.C. Penny Pinto frame that my little brother donated to my pile of junk frames when he quit mopeds this spring. Before i started blogging I had already dug up an old set of EBR forks and clip-on handlebars. 

I’m a cool guy though and cool guys need top-tank mopeds, so I planned on welding a cross bar and adding this sweet Sebring tank. I quickly realized, however, that I do not own a welder or know how to weld for that matter, so a new plan was realized:

i sawed a length of 2x4 and used a protractor to cut the angles so that they mated with the headtube and seatpost of the frame.

a quick mock-up of the tank shows that the lines weren’t quite as sexy as i had envisioned.

the reason being: real moped frames have those little mounting tabs that the tank can rest on, little round plugs that the c-shaped bracket underneath the tank slide snugly onto. I need something like that. SOLUTION:

i’ve heard of people building “frankenstein bikes” before, but this is a new level of literality. Wakka wakka wakka!

Well, the bolts fit nice but they were a little too long and they bumped together in the middle so i had to shorten them:

After a lot of straining (which resulted in a little bit of accidental tooting), i had cut the bolts down to size and built my perfect 20-minute cross bar!

here we go, tank mounted up, but i feel like it’s still a little wobbly, right? it’s not actually attached to the frame, just kinda wedged in there. so i figure a great method would be using galvanized pipe straps wrapped around the tube frame, and then screwed into the wooden bar. only problem is, i can’t find any pipe straps. So then i think “hey i’ll just cut up a beer can into strips and use that!” but alas, it was garbage day and there were no old beer cans to be found in the house. so i tried to cut this up:

it was way too tough. so instead i ended up drilling holes through the wood and using zip-ties. worked good enough.

You know, i think that’s the theme for this build: “GOOD ENOUGH”.