Okay, I have been riding this thing for a few days now and overall it has been going nicely. There is a little learning curve involved in starting this engine cold! For the uninformed, it is easy to flood it. Now, I pretty much close the choke, prime once and pull 2-3 times until I get a quick vroom, then open the choke and pull the cord one more time with the throttle pulled a little bit. burble burble burble ...
5-7Heaven, I think I will go to go back to the threaded rods, I have not been able to play around with chain alignment like I was able to before. I will however be going your route and cutting a couple of grade8 bolts off at the head if I can instead of using the rods from Home Depot, unless I find out that they are already grade8. Is there a grade 10 or a grade 1,000,000? Or is it stronger the lower the grade? If so is there a grade -1,000,000? I want to make sure those rods stay nice and straight.
So if I align the two gears perfectly, this should cut down on my wawawah? Currently, it is aligned right between the two gears, and I was figuring i would have to move it even further over so it aligned perfectly with the 12 tooth to avoid a problem where it kept wanting to engage the bigger gear... But if this increases the wawah using the 16 tooth, I don't want to do that. I have decided that the noise is irritating and it does cause a slight jerkiness that makes it not feel so smooth.
This brings me to the two speed issue. I have yet to try any mountain riding so I don't know how the 16 tooth will handle it, but compared to my old engine, this thing has a set of forged titanium balls that propel me right up the same hill at 35mph from a dead stop with zero pedaling where the old engine would be lucky to reach 16mph with me pedaling my *** off! So it looks like I may have to look into a tradeoff between wawah and fully realizing my two-speed dream.
Kerf, how do you handle this? Do you just live with a little wawawah or did you figure something out? Also, when I have the 12 tooth engaged, it does some weird thing where I think it catches on the 16 tooth gear and then drops off again. Not sure if this what is happening, but I can see (from my shadow on the ground actually) that the tensioner moves back and forth quite a bit when the thing starts jerking violently at about 12mph or so. This is what gave me the idea to align perfectly with the 12 tooth, but if that is going to generate even more wawawah I am not sure if I want that.