This all got started back in February when I purchased a cheap ebay kit for $90 to slap on my Huffy as I was getting sick of getting huffy from riding to the store.
It was one of the newer style motors with the single piece head and cylinder with a 32mm intake and thin as f*** mounting hardware. Despite being more than skilled mechanically, trying to get that damn rag joint mounted sprocket to align just about have me a stroke.
As Chinese products are usually made out of chineseium, so was this engine kit and everything started to break within the first two weeks. First it was mounting studs snapping, then came the fuel tank's mounting studs tearing the sheet metal, the motor soft seized at least once, it had little power, etc.
So after 2 weeks of ownership I went ahead and ordered a "poor boy" zeda 80 from zeda l motorsports which is essentially ported jug on an untouched base assembly. It seemed like a great deal but upon reflection it was the same exact kit as his ported zeda 80 for $50 more.(now it comes with a better head long with the porting work).
Along with that I ordered a 3.5l bikeberry gas tank to replaced the damaged kit tank and what I thought was an mz65 pipe (the dreaded zeda 88/cdh66).
That turd expansion chamber really woke the eBay motor up and made it almost pleasant to drive, if it wasn't for how goddamn loud it was for how little power it out out. So I grabbed that cheap silencer everyone uses from Amazon but wasn't able to get it to easily work.
Frustrated, I figured that if I was going to run loud that I'd atleast have a decent pipe and snagged up a beautiful condition mz65 pipe off of fb for fairly cheap. After a couple of weeks the motor came in and I excitedly got it installed. The moment I got it to fire and I felt the first couple pulses of the engine pull the bike forward, I fell in love. It was an entirely different experience compared to the ebay trash I had before. All that power and this was just simply a zeda 80 with only some cylinder porting and a cdh66 pipe!
Throwing on the mz65 gave me my first (and thus far only) experience of what an expansion chamber should feel like when "it comes on the pipe". The difference was up there with simply swapping from the ebay junk to the zeda. At this point I became obsessed with trying to eek out more power where I could.
The next day, I blew out the head gasket. Had the motor 6 days and the pipe for 1. Thankfully that was an easy fix.
It only took me about a week and a half to discover the chrome stinger was just friction fit/expoxied to the main stubby stinger. With it removed the stinger was the perfect diameter to press fit into the flange on the cheap Amazon silencer. Being sick of my right ear constantly ringing, I quickly got the installed and everything was much quieter albeit a fair bit slower.
After a couple more weeks I got sick of battling sprocket alignment issues so I got a clamshell adapter which addressed all of that along with making installation far, far quicker. That was great until I accidentally did a high revving clutch dump which spun the adapter, bending/breaking spokes and trashing the wheel. Thankfully the local shop had cheap $35 wheels with a perfect sized hub for my adapter to fit. Around this time I also cut the silencer in half as it was a bit ostentatious.
At this point I figured with the pipe and porting that the motor could really use a larger than stock carb and someone posted an ebay link on fb for a $20 19mm phbg clone that I couldn't resist.
That one minor action lead to me spending the next month learning everyf***ingthing there is to know about how the hell PHBG carbs operate, from the simple stuff like the needle clip position to the more in-depth stuff like selecting which one of 11 needles will work best or figuring out the differences between a 2 and 4 stroke atomizer tube (and that despite being replaceable normally, that it wasn't on the clone. Just to get this in tune. So much frustration was had.
Long story short, this clone was a really cheap imitation that didn't share many parts with a factory phbg and was unable to be made to function properly. As China taketh, China also giveith and I found a seller on aliexpress that had a near perfect clone of a 21mm phbg racing (racing means bowl plug for quick main jet changes) with the desired 2 stroke atomizer tube for just $35.
A smarter man would have simply coughed up the extra money for a Mikuni vm18 however I'm not one to forsake hard-earned knowledge and not utilize it. That and I already had a bunch of jets and needles for the phbg and was being cheap.
It took quite a few hours of trial-and-error to get the carburetor to a point where it's running mostly good. These dell'orto phbg carburetors can be a pain because you have a pilot jet, main jet, needle size/type, needle clip position to adjust/change out to get your bike running perfectly. The main jets can be had for really cheap however I discovered the dirt cheap ones are never the size they say they are. Sadly, for whatever reason, you cannot get pilot jets for very cheap nor does anyone sell them in multiple packs. Since I didn't want to spend near what I did on the carburetor on a few pilot jets I instead got a $5 set of micro drill bits, some solder, and drilled the jet to the size I needed. This worked, but I would have greatly preferred to simply just swap the jet.
Once the carburetor was tuned well enough I threw on a CDH CNC head give the motor better cooling in the hot Arizona summer heat.
All was perfect... Until the piston ring got caught in a transfer port at 7500 rpm, trashing the piston and damaging the cylinder.
Continued in the next post.... (15 image limit)
It was one of the newer style motors with the single piece head and cylinder with a 32mm intake and thin as f*** mounting hardware. Despite being more than skilled mechanically, trying to get that damn rag joint mounted sprocket to align just about have me a stroke.
As Chinese products are usually made out of chineseium, so was this engine kit and everything started to break within the first two weeks. First it was mounting studs snapping, then came the fuel tank's mounting studs tearing the sheet metal, the motor soft seized at least once, it had little power, etc.
So after 2 weeks of ownership I went ahead and ordered a "poor boy" zeda 80 from zeda l motorsports which is essentially ported jug on an untouched base assembly. It seemed like a great deal but upon reflection it was the same exact kit as his ported zeda 80 for $50 more.(now it comes with a better head long with the porting work).
Along with that I ordered a 3.5l bikeberry gas tank to replaced the damaged kit tank and what I thought was an mz65 pipe (the dreaded zeda 88/cdh66).
That turd expansion chamber really woke the eBay motor up and made it almost pleasant to drive, if it wasn't for how goddamn loud it was for how little power it out out. So I grabbed that cheap silencer everyone uses from Amazon but wasn't able to get it to easily work.
Frustrated, I figured that if I was going to run loud that I'd atleast have a decent pipe and snagged up a beautiful condition mz65 pipe off of fb for fairly cheap. After a couple of weeks the motor came in and I excitedly got it installed. The moment I got it to fire and I felt the first couple pulses of the engine pull the bike forward, I fell in love. It was an entirely different experience compared to the ebay trash I had before. All that power and this was just simply a zeda 80 with only some cylinder porting and a cdh66 pipe!
Throwing on the mz65 gave me my first (and thus far only) experience of what an expansion chamber should feel like when "it comes on the pipe". The difference was up there with simply swapping from the ebay junk to the zeda. At this point I became obsessed with trying to eek out more power where I could.
The next day, I blew out the head gasket. Had the motor 6 days and the pipe for 1. Thankfully that was an easy fix.
It only took me about a week and a half to discover the chrome stinger was just friction fit/expoxied to the main stubby stinger. With it removed the stinger was the perfect diameter to press fit into the flange on the cheap Amazon silencer. Being sick of my right ear constantly ringing, I quickly got the installed and everything was much quieter albeit a fair bit slower.
After a couple more weeks I got sick of battling sprocket alignment issues so I got a clamshell adapter which addressed all of that along with making installation far, far quicker. That was great until I accidentally did a high revving clutch dump which spun the adapter, bending/breaking spokes and trashing the wheel. Thankfully the local shop had cheap $35 wheels with a perfect sized hub for my adapter to fit. Around this time I also cut the silencer in half as it was a bit ostentatious.
At this point I figured with the pipe and porting that the motor could really use a larger than stock carb and someone posted an ebay link on fb for a $20 19mm phbg clone that I couldn't resist.
That one minor action lead to me spending the next month learning everyf***ingthing there is to know about how the hell PHBG carbs operate, from the simple stuff like the needle clip position to the more in-depth stuff like selecting which one of 11 needles will work best or figuring out the differences between a 2 and 4 stroke atomizer tube (and that despite being replaceable normally, that it wasn't on the clone. Just to get this in tune. So much frustration was had.
Long story short, this clone was a really cheap imitation that didn't share many parts with a factory phbg and was unable to be made to function properly. As China taketh, China also giveith and I found a seller on aliexpress that had a near perfect clone of a 21mm phbg racing (racing means bowl plug for quick main jet changes) with the desired 2 stroke atomizer tube for just $35.
A smarter man would have simply coughed up the extra money for a Mikuni vm18 however I'm not one to forsake hard-earned knowledge and not utilize it. That and I already had a bunch of jets and needles for the phbg and was being cheap.
It took quite a few hours of trial-and-error to get the carburetor to a point where it's running mostly good. These dell'orto phbg carburetors can be a pain because you have a pilot jet, main jet, needle size/type, needle clip position to adjust/change out to get your bike running perfectly. The main jets can be had for really cheap however I discovered the dirt cheap ones are never the size they say they are. Sadly, for whatever reason, you cannot get pilot jets for very cheap nor does anyone sell them in multiple packs. Since I didn't want to spend near what I did on the carburetor on a few pilot jets I instead got a $5 set of micro drill bits, some solder, and drilled the jet to the size I needed. This worked, but I would have greatly preferred to simply just swap the jet.
Once the carburetor was tuned well enough I threw on a CDH CNC head give the motor better cooling in the hot Arizona summer heat.
All was perfect... Until the piston ring got caught in a transfer port at 7500 rpm, trashing the piston and damaging the cylinder.
Continued in the next post.... (15 image limit)