Woke up this morning and headed to Bothell to turn some wrenches on the Puch Maxi (I’m just gonna say that’s the plural as well as the singular because “Maxis” makes it look like a whole new word). Sarah dropped me off at my parents’ place where Tyler is currently house sitting and has turned the garage into a moped workshop. Sarah went off to a belly dance workshop while Tyler and I played mopeds. With Sarah’s bike (the two-speed Puch Maxi) in decent running condition I started by focusing on bike two, the one-speed Puch Maxi (I’d call it mine, but I know that Sarah would argue that they’re both her’s and she’ll be nice enough to let me ride it when it’s running). This was the “parts bike” we’re trying to bring back from the dead. The forks it had originally come with were bent, but we had managed to pull those off and salvage the springs and bushings out of them. Now we were installing the new ones. It went pretty easily; especially with the help of some SuperLube synthetic grease which seemed to work well.
The next part of the project was to clean out the gas tank. Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed as I poured degreaser, was that even when the gas line was closed it was still dripping out – leaky petcock. The parts list for the day had begun. I took off the old petcock and finished cleaning out the tank anyways. While I was having fun with chemicals, Tyler decided to give putting new tires and tubes on our four wheels a go. It seemed to be going relatively we’ll until the pop and hiss of a punctured tube broke our spirits. We decided since we had to go to Seattle Mopeds anyways that we’d let them show us how the pros put tires on. So, we packed up and piled in Tyler’s car.
Along the way we decided to see about getting the Puchs registered. They were sold without titles but luckily there is a very nice workaround for that. A few minutes, and a wad of cash, later I walked out of the DOL with two new license plates and registration forms. When we arrived at Seattle Mopeds I picked up a new petcock and watched as their mechanic painstakingly showed us how to properly install a tire. The first one seemed to go smoothly, aside from the brute force required, and he got it on their. The second one was a bit more of a struggle. Tyler didn’t feel so bad after we watched the pro kill two tubes. But, third time is a charm. As we took the tire off the next weel, we could tell it was from the bike with the bent fork as the wheel had a large bend. We decided to leave the tire installation efforts at two and search online for a new wheel instead of putting rubber on twisted metal. Unfortunately, when we got back to Bothell, we realized that the tire that seemed easy must have had a slow leak because the tube inside had deflated. So, I put my newly learned skill to the test and removed the bad tube, installed a good one, and got the tire back over the rim of the wheel without issue. That makes my current successful tire installation ratio 1 for 1. We’ll see how long it holds.
With the new rubber pumped up to the spec on the sidewall, we took Tyler’s Baretta 44 and the two-speed Maxi (now 100% street legal) out for a quick spin around the neighborhood. We caught a few, of what I’m sure were envious, looks and parked them back into the garage for another day.
