I bought a moped

[EclipseTurbno93]

I made the journey home this weekend to pick up The Red Streak. At first, my plan was to take the Miata down and borrow my dad's explorer sport trac to get it back up to the burg, then to put up with driving a slow, gas guzzling pseudo-truck for a month or so. Taylor decided that was a silly plan and offered to let me borrow his truck to make the journey hock: First thoughts were "aw hell no I don't want to break that thing." Second thought was "man that would be way more convenient," so after repeatedly making sure he was okay with it, we swapped keys and I set off, feeling the pressure.


The trip was thankfully uneventful and I got to stop by Richmond to see Matt which was nice. The next day I had some time before I needed to set off, so I dug into the moped a bit. First I gave it a spray-down with the power sprayer to knock off the appalling amount of dirt that had built up and gave it (and Taylor's truck) a quick wash. Overall it's in pretty good shape, a couple small rust spots on the frame, but nothing deep or serious. The inside of the gas tank also looks generally clean, no obvious rusting or significant build up.

Next up was to try to start troubleshooting why it was not wanting to start. First thing I noticed was that the loose belt was slipping as I was trying to turn the engine over. The procedure to tighten the belt made me chuckle, as all you do is loosen the three engine mounting bolts and pull the engine forward in the frame and re-tighten it. This made turning the engine much, much easier and eliminated one of the terrible noises it was making :thumbup:

Next, I checked was to make sure I had compression (thumb over the spark plug hole and turn it over) which was good. It was also at this time that I realized it has no exhaust on it, but that's a problem for another time.

Then I checked to see if it had spark. Since I do not have a key for it, I just pulled the switch and spliced the ignition wires together, leaving out the kill switch wire to eliminate a variable. I then held the plug by the boot and touched the casing to the head in order to ground it and kicked it over. Nada, no spark. Decided to make sure it wasn't just the plug so I got a new one and did the same thing, but had the same results. Checked the wiring connections to make sure everything was clean and everything looked okay :dunno:

At this point I ran out of time so put it all back together and loaded up to head back. Had another blessedly uneventful ride home and it is now sitting on my porch waiting to be messed with again. From the research I've done, it seems the next step is to check and clean the ignition contact points and make sure the magneto is indeed producing electricity. Unfortunately, the contact points are only accessible with the engine removed from the frame, so I guess that might be the next thing to do. I have never worked on a small engine or a magneto driven system or a carbureted engine, so a lot of new things for me, but I'm learning a lot and it is fun so far.


Thanks again to Taylor for saving my butt :bow: