Big shout out's and thank you to the following people:
- Derek Bandit
- Ash Bandit (drove chase and credit for most of the pictures)
- Gian (hotel room in Jackson! thanks dude!)
- Matt C (vespa parts hook up)
- Joe Peg from the internet (vespa parts hookup)
- Casseroller Jake (Mad welding skills)
- Roberto from Peddy Cash (housing and swag)
- Lisa Lahman and Neil Lahman (the bestest hotel room ever and day 1 pit crew)
- Mike Paragone (polini 80 cylinder I blew up)
- Nick Hardy (donations!)
Pre-Travel
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| Soooooo many belts |
T-minus 4 days to Chicago Departure
Work went well at first and I got a lot done. I also decided to build a new subframe too... what could possibly go wrong. I drew the pieces in Inventor 2013, cut them out of 3 gauge steel with my Oxy Acetylene torch, and then started piecing them together. I went with 3/4" tubing which was probably a little overkill, but turned out ok.
So, the subframe kept going well.... Everything else did not. I broke the reed valve case half in the vice cleaning it up - 8 hours of work wasted. Then had to go with a regular case half and a rotary stock intake. That would have been fine and well, but since the intake flange on the case had failed on my DR65 engine, I decided I'd grind the intake spout off, add material, deck it flat and make it into a 13mm intake with a steel bolt on plate intake.
T-minus 3 days to Chicago Departure
Mistake 2. That was going ok... until I burned the crap out of my hand making the intake and the metal part I had just cut burned the leather glove to my hand and gave me the most impressive blister I'd ever had.
Fine. I've blown up my case half, blown up myself and it's day two of working in the garage... What could possibly go wrong... The rest of the work days were incredibly slow. By the end of day two, my last supplement of parts had arrived for both my car and my bike. I could finally finish my gearboxes, finish fabrication on my subframe and maybe get some time in on my daily subframe I had built up during my undergrad to polish it up and clean it. Day 3 was spent mending wounds and patching my cases up... So much bad stuff happened to those cases. I shoulda taken it as a sign.
T-minus 2 days to Chicago Departure
Day two saw me with a running second engine! Huzzah! Finally all my work had paid off! (or so I thought).
I started running this thing, and it just wouldn't act right... I kept trouble shooting... and trouble shooting... and trouble shooting....
T-minus 1 days to Chicago Departure
At the end of the night, I thought an HT coil swap had me sorted... More running in the morning had me convinced it was something else. I was pre-detonating despite have a 1.5mm squish and 160ish compression with static timing at 15* BTDC. 3 mins of riding and it would detonate like crazy above half throttle with great looking plugs. I kept scaling it back further and further trying to figure out what had happened to it and was out doing a test run trying to limp it back, and it seized.... After taking it apart, there were markings in the piston crown that coincided directly with the squish band in the head from detonation. So, I hogged the squish band out to be super mellow, cleaned the aluminum off the cylinder wall with acid, honed it and tried again. The cylinder cleaned up amazingly with a barely visible mark above the exhaust port.
Still detonating... Took the head off and everything was coated in an aluminum slurry. At this point, I stripped everything off of the subframe, and put it in boxes that were now spare parts instead of a spare built and running subframe. My guess is that parts of the case let loose, but I haven't found exactly where the aluminum was coming from... The kit is still in great shape with no piston chunks missing, just horribly full of aluminum slurry.
At this point, I just loaded up my DR65 already built and running engine, and started loading to get to Louisville so we could leave for Chicago. The polini 46mm wouldn't happen for this trip and I only had one built and running engine for pinball.
Later that night, I arrived in Louisville, we loaded Derek and Ash's things and off we went to Chicago.
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| Louisville Departure |
We stayed with Roberto of Peddy Cash in Chicago and had a bit of a mishap when we unloaded Derek's bike that night.
One Day Before Race Day
So, earlier in the morning of the day before race day, we dropped Derek's bike on the pipe and broke the exhaust flange spout off of the cylinder. CRAP. We frantically started emailing and found a Casseroller named Jake who is actually an aircraft level aluminum welder.
Before leaving, Roberto gave us some sweet shirts and some awesome stickers... Much thanks dude.
We show up to Minneapolis after a long drive, torrential rain and an awesome dinner. Jake had a sweet rig in his garage with just enough gas to work his magic on the exhaust spout and patch Derek's exhaust flange together. Seriously... that dude can work some magic with TIG.
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| dude can weld |
We met up with Lisa and Neil in Minneapolis after our miraculous repair and they got us the swankiest of swankiest hotel rooms and a beer before bed (you guys rock!). We had no idea what we had in store, but we were stoked. Derek slapped his repaired cylinder back on his engine, and off to bed we went.
Minneapolis to Cedar Rapids
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| 4 blocks from the starting line |
The day of the race was hectic to say the least... We showed up, and started doing all our last minute wrenching (never waste a minute right?). I had electrical to tidy up, and had even had to jumper my HT coil to my CDI box on the ride there from the hotel with my DMM leads. Sheesh. Lisa and Neil were there to see us off, we said goodbye and away we went.
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| Team VESPA glam shot before sweat, blood and tears |
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| Starting line! |
The first day was epic... there was so much corn...
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| Routing.... |
We rolled in with a respectable time on the first day despite a lot of trouble... we were shocked how well we did despite all the trouble we had the first day... The first half of the day for every day it seems like we tooled around and messed around, and then really got to it for the second half of the day and always had a respectable finish. The worst part of the first day was me having to stop on the side of the highway and wire my bike for lights since I ran out of time... Big time not fun.
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| Day 1 arrival.... nobody thought we'd make it |
That night, Derek springed for a hotel room and we got a GREAT night's sleep.
Cedar Rapids to St. Louis
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| Day two Departure |
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and then there was corn. |
Then we got pulled over for the first time....
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| and more corn and cops telling us about their crazy go carts... |
Then we got pulled over again... and again...
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| routing to avoid interstates.... |
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| gas and go baby |
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| top speed day 2! |
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| Into Illinois! |
We had minimal problems the rest of the day and rolled into St. Louis with another respectable time considering we were riding Vespas!
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| Shady Jack's Motorcycle Parts finish line... party was around back. |
St. Louis to Memphis
St. Louis to Memphis WAS a great day until we were almost out of Missouri (misery????) We KILLED IT. All. Day. Looked like we were going to take second or third for the day because of Derek's superior routing and us blasting all day.
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| Some highway, some Vespas, somewhere. |
I even hit 56mph on a downhill with maybe a little revs left to go... Creepily, this was right before I had a flat at 48mph. I rode it out and we did a nascar style wheel change. No pics unfortunately, but it was fast...
until...
My engine started overheating. I kept upjetting further and further and couldn't limp it along any further. I think ultimately it was a headleak, but I saw absolutely no oil around my head mating surface, so I ruled that out and in a last ditch effort - resealed my whole engine on the side of the road inside my jacket. Reassembled and still had a leak at the carb... almost threw it on the car, but messed with my intake a little, got it sealed, and blasted the rest of the way to memphis and didn't break 370*F head temps the whole way. Before, I was barely getting above half throttle and already over 400 before resealing it... I wouldn't have made it to Memphis without resealing my engine.
Memphis to Jackson
Memphis to Jackson was the shortest distance, but the most grueling, hot, discouraging, challenging and fateful. Things went great until we got into Mississippi and we hit the mid-day heat... Despite having re-sealed my engine in Missouri the previous day, I was having HUGE problems with overheating. We stopped for some transmission tinkering and got a realllllly rude visit from a Free Mason which was a huge bummer... those dudes are supposed to be extra awesome. He hassled us hard core and was super rude. The gentleman who's drive way we stopped in later that day in Mississippi was much nicer and restored our faith in Mississippi.
I kept chasing head leaks because that's all I could think of. My bike was down on power, wanting huge jets and over heating. I inspected the head and reseated my decomp valve in my head. This helped, but was still a no go. The heat was terrible... everything was going wrong and Derek and I decided we'd be better off to swap in the one spare engine we had that he had brought. He helped me get a lot knocked out at the gas station, then departed and sprinted ahead to try and get a decent time for us.
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| the most characterful gas station ever |
I got the vespa back up, temps were still high on the spare engine, despite me putting a jet size in that was 10 sizes bigger than what Derek had used in it and had it perfectly tuned in Louisville. I was hot, but not as hot as I was with my engine, so we pushed on at low 40's, riding the temp gauge, not top speed or desired speed. Then bad got worse. The bearings on Derek's engine that he had ridden 1000mi without cracking open went out - despite being new NTN's from the start and running really awesome synthetic oil. We stopped and decided he'd take his engine I was using back, and I'd ride mine till it blew.
Both engines swapped and 50 mi later, Derek's second engine that I had been riding on with moderate temps also blew... We sat on the side of the road trying to decide what to do... We were so beat from the heat. We decided we were too tired to try and fix either of his engines, and that I would press on until my engine blew. If it did, we'd load up and start the trek home in the morning. By far the lowest point of the whole pinball run.
Then the sun went down... and everything changed....
My bike had been overheating because of the intense heat. Sundown left it running like a champ. For about an hour, I probably averaged 50mph. 50mi outside of Jackson, I started getting a weird detonation sound and some pinging. I limped it to Jackson unable to go faster than 40mph without scary pre-ignition noises. But we made it.
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| Jackson finish line. |
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| Sabats and the best work bench ever... We might have wrecked all the wash cloths in the room... |
When we arrived, I was dead. We decided Derek would ride the final day on my grande, and we wrenched preparing it for battle the next day. Decarboned the exhaust and head in attempts to get rid of the detonation and slapped it back together.
Jackson to NOLA
My most enjoyable day probably, because Derek was riding my bike and I got to watch.... which is actually quite nerve racking. Best pit stops by far the whole trip. Definitely saw the advantage of teams with more than 1 rider, but we wouldn't have done it any other way. Derek killed it the first half of the day, then my bike started acting up... Weird combos of detonating above 40 and 4 stroking a little. Turns out my compression was super super mega extra high after reseating the decomp valve in my head and I think that's where the detonation was coming from. The 4 stroking came from running an 86 dellorto jet in a 13mm carb... and rain... the rain definitely didn't help. With MCR right on our tail, and us still averaging 40mph despite this, we decided to leave everything alone for the last hour and press on.
Crossing Lake Pontchartrain was super amazing... and I might have gotten a little jealous...
Some easy city riding... and we were done. How. Amazing. MPLS to NOLA on a moped - and a vespa moped at that.
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| We finished y'all. Team VESPA! |
We pretty much took it easy the rest of the day, and got ready for an afternoon out on the town before going home the next day.
The Day After...
Saturday was awesome.... We had Beignets at Cafe Beignet, and I also had a Mimosa and double cappuccino.
Then we had gator burgers and sweet potato fries and went to a real time Voodoo shop... Walked down bourbon street and even saw some bare boobs walking down the street. The whole New Orleans experience.
We stopped in Montgomery for pork and then my bike fell off the car on I65 N. Sweet. Some damage, but nothing that can't be fixed. Mostly the brand new pipe I had just put on took the brunt of the force... Yay! Pit stop in Nashville, then Louisville, then on my way to Knoxville. Had time for a 30 min nap at a gas station before arriving to work 20mins before my shift started, shaved in the bathroom and worked all day Sunday! What a trip...
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