Old Kid with a New Toy

motorhedfred

New Member
Local time
10:08 AM
Joined
Jul 30, 2009
Messages
25
Hello all from northeastern Ohio.

I just joined a few days ago. I found this and "the other" forum by Googling (is that in the dictionaries yet ?) for motorized bicycle information. I bought one of the first 4 cycle trimmers years ago after reading about them in Popular Science magazine and in the back of my mind I remember thinking "this would make a great Wizzer engine substitute". No disrespect intended to those among you running 2 strokes, but I've never liked them.

Well after 14 years of service I've retired my old Ryobi 975r from landscaping duty and want to builded a motored bicycle with the engine. To be honest, the last few years were frustrating as it stalled a lot and was hard to start. It's been replaced with a Worx brand cordless, rechargable electric (Hmmmmm, who knows....maybe I'll make it push my lazy butt around someday too ...).

I'm now looking for a cheap but good bicycle. I'm partial to cruiser style bikes but not single speeds. I've looked at the Huffy Cranbrook, Schwinn Point Beach, Schwinn Link and Next LaJolla. My son has an old Mongoose full suspension mountain bike I could pilfer parts from to make a multi-speed out of the Huffy, but buying one already built that way seems more appealing.

I'm hoping for suggestions or info on any of the above stuff. I'd really like to find a matching 975r, mount them both to and aluminum plate, connect them via a rubber cog belt and make a half-baked v-twin out of them. It would be fun changing the spacing between firing events and changing how it sounds.

Maybe I should wait till I get one done before trying that however.
 
Welcome, each of those bikes would make a good choice. I put my motor on a Kulana Moon dog. Seven speed, good sturdy frame, and best of all, cheap. Thank goodness for "Wally World" even if it will be the ruination of the world as we know it (but that is a differend thread all together.

Let us know how it turns out and throw in some pics, too.

Later, Scott
 
That idea with two motors would be cool...

As far as using the old weedwhacker motor... not so cool. If it is having mechanical problems you might want to think about getting them fixed or a whole new motor all together. You will ride this thing a ton... trust me. Some days farther than others and you don't want to get way out in the middle of nowhere away from your house (and tools) and break down. As far as the wal-mart Schwinn bikes... some people say they have problems with them and some say they are just fine... kinda seem cheap to me. I have seen the lajolla and it seems to be better quality than the schwinn but I haven't motorized one so I cant say from experience.

Anyways... welcome to the site, please fell free to ask any questions you might have.
 
One of the reasons I want to do this is for entertainment. Winter's coming and that means project time. I'm not quite ready to start on my old Yamaha XS650 so this would be a good warm up project.

The garage got cleaned out this spring.....a little too clean to suit me. Time to make a mess.

I've been researching parts at work and I think I can source some of from there. Heck, we even sell those cool looking Coker red 26" tires !

I took the Ryobi part way apart last night and I like the engineering. It's full of intricate, elegent solutions to space limitations......and it has trick looking exposed pushrod tubes. The rocker arms look like miniature small block Chevy stamped steel rockers with pivot balls, screw in studs and even guide plates. I was hoping it had seperate cams for intake and exhaust so I could retime them and swap the intake and exhaust ports on one engine, but it doesn't.

More later....

MHF
 
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