Where are all the young riders?

 Where are all the young people in the scooter community of riders today?  Scooters are for the young and the young at heart.  They are relatively inexpensive to purchase and maintain.  While there are expensive scooters, there are many reliable affordable options.  Scooters were ideal transportation when we were young and they still are today.  So why don't we see more young people in our club or on the road?

 Speaking from personal experience, I had a 7 mile commute to my summer job waiting tables at the country club.  I didn't have a car when I started and depended on someone to pick me up and drop me off.  (I had bicycled the route several times, but arriving at work all red-faced and sweaty while donning a tuxedo shirt did not provide good tableside presentation.)  A scooter or even a moped would have been ideal transportation.  My mum was against it.  (She was denied her preferred VW Beetle in favor of the late model "Yellow Submarine" Buick that her brothers endorsed for her.)  I am the eldest among my siblings and had to set the bar for my younger siblings.  My family was not wealthy and my father worked hard.  I was led to believe he didn't have spare cash to buy another car, nor did I have an older sibling to lean on.  (The family financial situation miraculously changed when my sisters wanted a car :-/ ).  It was up to me to get myself mobile.  Having been summarily denied two-wheel transport, even though my father had been a Vespa rider in his youth.  I set about spending more money on resurrecting a car from the junkyard to be roadworthy than would have been spent on a new moped or small Japanese scooter.  I did learn to weld, wrench, and restore through this process.  Nobody made me do it.  I WANTED to be free to travel, to make money, save for the future, and to spend my earnings as I pleased.  When you live outside of town, transportation is a requirement for these goals.

 So I postulate that it is not the parents denying their kids the freedom of motorized transport.  Parents do perhaps implant a notion in their children that motorbikes are "unsafe".  That stereotype is hard to break.  Growing up my friend from next door and I built all kinds of motorized contraptions from parts we could beg, or pull from the trash.  So parental denial didn't really work for me in the end.  If you want to ride badly enough, a youngster will find a way.  None of these contraptions were road legal, but it got us the taste of what it would be like to ride a dirt bike.  My father just smiled at these attempts, but could not by marital oath, go against my mother's wishes.  (For goodness sake my old man is now doing the same thing we were doing.  He's now the crazy one flying airplanes and strapping engines onto bicycles at +80 years young trying to regain his lost youth.)

(My father, the Vespa rider from the 1960's, on my Stella.)

 My first day at my first professional job I was introduced around the office.  Stephen was my cubicle neighbor and once pleasantries were over he quickly asked me, "Do you ride?"  I wanted to ride, but hadn't been nurtured to do so.  Stephen said something to the affect of, "We'll soon fix that.  We have a lot of riders in the office."  We spent the rest of the winter finding a >500cc suitable motorcycle, and by April the engine was rebuilt and I was a happy young man.  It wasn't a scooter like I initially dreamed, but it had two wheels and it was MINE to ride with my friends.  Mum couldn't deter me any longer.  With my new mentor's coaching, I became an alert and competent rider.  The camaraderie of biking with those friends has lasted to this day.  Stephen doesn't ride as much as he should these days, but he is still the youngest at heart of anyone that I know and hold dear.

(The youngest punk kid at an Americade rally)

 Not a year after I bought my first motorcycle, I bought a bigger one!  Included is a photo of Stephen and I together at the Americade Touring Rally. You can see the stupid smile on my face.  I was living the dream!  There was nothing to stop me, a young professional man in his twenties with an engineer's salary could buy pretty much whatever he wanted.  So what keeps a young person from wanting to motorcycle or scooter?  Where are they?  They do not seem to emerge from high school drooling over two wheels these days.  As a young professional, they have the money to buy a car and an inexpensive scooter.  Why do they not?  Have they not been properly introduced to what a joy riding can be?

 Today's aspirations have changed.  As a young person if you want to interact with a friend, or the rest of the world for that matter, it can be done online.  Stuck in front of a mobile device or computer, kids don't have to leave their homes to escape and do things with other kids.  There's no desire to get out for an adventure and roam around.  Video games provide interaction with friends.  Video chat and texting provide lackluster interaction with other people.  Food is delivered, friends don't look one another in the eye when talking.  There's no hanging out at the community storefront or going down to the café for a snack anymore.  Seriously, I don't know how young people even manage to date anymore?

 The Disney movie Luca as brought the Vespa brand name and image to the youth of the world.  The classic outline of the Vespa is now instantly recognizable to children thanks to this movie.  The protagonists of the movie dream of escape and adventure on a Vespa, and spend most of the moving scheming to get the scooter of their dreams.  I won't tell you how it ends, but the impression left on young viewers is obvious.  I can ride my bright red Vespa past a group of kids, raise my helmet and shout "Silenzio Bruno", which causes the children to erupt in the same response with fists raised and cheering.  Likewise a more obvious attempt at gathering young riders is the anime series Super Cub.  How could Honda not have sponsored the production of the beautiful animation!  The series follows a lonely and awkward high school girl's life be transformed.  Koguma, the main character, makes friends and becomes a confident young woman because of her new found abilities.  The camaraderie she discovers is one that every scooterist finds once they start riding with friends.  This is the kind of media influence that the scooter industry needs to get young riders dreaming of two wheels.  Umpteen years from now, will we see a spike in sales as these young impressionable minds come to driving age?

(Years ago my son very seriously taking his cupcake for a power wheels ride.)

 There are a few gear-head youngsters around.  I applaud them.  Cheap powerful cars are available and scooters are laughable to them.  I'll show up at the coffee shop with a full parking lot, and still find a place to park my scoot.  The young boys probably scoff at me under their breath while driving their +200 hp rice burners.  As long as they are enjoying themselves, I don't mind what they are doing.  The point is that they didn't choose a scooter or a motorcycle.  At present we're more wealthy today in middle-class America and a comfortable all-weather car is in their financial grasp (or their parents).  Parents will actually go out and buy their kid a car.  I was appalled when I learned this was common practice.  These young kids didn't earn the car, they don't respect it.  I'll see them later on in the year, and learn that the car given to them was totaled.  It is a different world today, but I try to do my part.  My son helped restore a moped, that he can now ride around the yard.  He learned to ride on a Trail 90 with the help of his grandfather.

 I think we do very well as a group of middle-aged graying folks along with our retired friends choosing transport.  The kids look at us and how are they not inspired!  We're having the time of our lives and is it that they just don't understand why we're so happy?  Is it because they've been denied by their parents, they've been given a more comfortable alternative, and they don't view the freedom of the open road and adventure the same as we do?

 I'd like to see more young people in the scooter scene.  We've got children of well established scooterists involved, but not many others.  There are both older lifelong scooterists and new enthusiasts that have discovered the joy at middle-age.  People aren't getting married at a very young age these days from what I've seen.  I can't see that it is the care of young children that holds back the 20 to 30 year old crowd from scooting other than lack of desire.  They haven't been tempted.  They haven't been nurtured to desire the clean and fun transportation that a scooter provides.

 How are the young people reached?  The demand for good scooter manufacturing is driven by the market.  In a densely populated environment scooters are much more common.  We see new scooters as a joyful toy packed with technology today, but is that really bringing in new riders?  I'm not sure it does.  Will the promise of economical, environmentally friendly transport attract new riders?  I'm not sure that will do it either, in America at least.  We'll just have to keep doing what we normally do as a club.  Scooters are a parade wherever we go, no matter how many of us there are.  We wave, beep, and smile just to let everyone know that we are having the time of our lives!

Sunbeam S7 Deluxe - Crankcase Breather

I recently met up with a nearby Sunbeam owner from Lancaster County (across the river).  We compared our machines and discussed improvements and modifications.

One thing that my friend noticed was the crankcase breather on my Deluxe.  I wanted to avoid fouling plugs, and a disturbed mixture, so instead of routing the breather back into the air cleaner, I used a road tube.  Since there isn't much opportunity for a "draft tube" like on a car, another method was in order.  The standard breather "check" valves stopped working of course.

I obtained a brake booster check valve from Dorman products and mounted it alongside the frame rail, just above the side engine damper.  Since the valve's inlet port diameter was quite large, it needed to be reduced.  So I put another hose inside that one.  The outlet tube then goes along the frame rail behind the silencer.

The larger port is the inlet, the smaller one on the side is the outlet.

Part #: 80189

The brake booster check valve insures that crankcase is well vented.  The front of the engine stays clean, and the vapors are deposited well behind the rear wheel.

Honda CX500 - "fantastinen" Finnbox FBG47 CDI ignition

Problem Statement:

Honda doesn't produce the CDI ignition module for the early CX500 motorcycles.  The capacitors and semiconductors are now over 30 years old and probably not performing as they did when they were new.

These are the symptoms my CX500 was beginning to experience:

• Hard Starting
• Misfire while on choke
• "Flat" spots in the rev range
• Hesitation from idle
• Misfire while accelerating hard
• Total loss of power in the rain

As a benchmark, the bike was getting around 48mpg with backroad and commuting to work type of driving.

Naturally the carburetors were eliminated as a culprit.  They have been cleaned, rebuilt, balanced, and tweaked repeatedly.  The spark coils were replaced with new modern ones from an ATV.  The spark plugs were changed to a resistor type plug and the resistors were eliminated from the caps.  These upgrades only provided marginal improvement.  The bike no longer ran on one cylinder at start, but still had all the other problems.

I also checked the stator and source coil winding to make sure they were healthy.  

I had the whole engine out over the winter, so checking the resistance readings was easy.  The insulation was good, so I had no doubts that the G47 stator was in good health.

I started reading about the ignition module and found this post on the CX/GL500 forum.  This seemed like the appropriate solution.

(There was also a Ignitech option, which was computer programmable, and cost several hundred dollars.  This wasn't something that I was interested in.)

The Solution:

I contacted "Andy62" from the forum and he replied swiftly confirming that he could happily make a Finnbox FBG47 for me.  Like any good engineer he had decided to make what he could not purchase.  The result is a re-engineered version of the CDI ignition module similar to the original, but unique with modern components.  A few short weeks later it showed up in the mail from Finland.  The exchange of emails between Aki and myself was pleasant and I'm very grateful for his dedication and stewardship to support the Honda CX500.

... and was promptly installed

It is a well engineered product, for something that wasn't supposed to be a commercial venture.  As enthusiasts we are indebted to people like this that use their talents to support old equipment.  The board is professionally created, and the components are thoughtfully arranged and packaged.  The whole module is enclosed in a tough water-tight enclosure, with the leads coming out sealed nicely.

Hook up was easy, and he even supplied a set of mating barrel connectors for the flying leads.

From top to bottom:

White = Right Coil

Yellow = Left Coil

Blue = Kill Switch

The source wire pairs were White and White / Blue.

If you put a thin screwdriver down alongside the original twin connector you can push the original spades out and re-use the housing with the new connectors.

The ground was obvious, and went under the original hold-down screw on the left side of the bike. 

(The mounting screw on the right side of the bike was eliminated so that the new Finnbox would sit properly.)

The stator connector was also obvious, and fit directly into the original place, and secured with hook-loop "Velcro" to the inner fender.

The whole Finnbox enclosure was secured to the bike frame with "Velcro" and also zip-tied securely in place.  (Belt and Suspenders) Wires were just the right length to be routed to the original locations, and tied securely in place.

(Ignore that little cube relay, that's for my tail-lamp flasher module.)

Results:

The bike fired up easily after the final termination.  I couldn't wait to test it so I went out right away.

The initial results were very noticeable.  The bike ran evenly on both cylinders while warming up.  There was no misfire present at all.  The requirement for choke was perhaps even shortened as I rode off up the road.  The acceleration at around 4500 rpm went straight through past 5000 rpm with no flat spot or hesitation.  These are all very good results and brought a wide grin to my face.

• Improved - Less misfires when cold
• Solved - No flat spot on acceleration from idle
• Solved - No flat spot or misfire at mid-range engine speed.
• Solved - Pulls like a mule when accelerating hard.... (now I notice the clutch slips a little)
• I haven't been in the rain yet, but I'm fairly sure that was due to weak spark, and should be fine now.

The 300 mile trip I took over this past weekend yielded a respectable 60 miles to the gallon with mostly highway riding.  I don't think I ever could do better than 55 mpg before, and I was keeping up with traffic and the rest of the motorcycle group who all had >900cc bikes.

Long term results of fuel economy are improved, but negligible.  The around-town fuel economy remains about the same in the mid 50's mpg.

Overall a successful and simple upgrade for the average rider, with all the really hard work done by friend and benefactor in Finland Mr. Aki "Andy62" Lötjönen.

Sunbeam S7 clutch cable

KYL95 needed a new clutch cable. The original was beginning to fray around the upper ferrule. (I've been stranded with a snapped clutch cable and its not worth the risk.)
I obtained a Venhill universal cable kit.  It came with the following parts and a nice set of directions on how to make up the cable properly. Many of the pieces I didn't plan to use, but everything was there.
Stripping the original cable off showed the poor condition of both the sheath and cable. I was mainly concerned with the fraying, but the bends in the cable were making more slop than needed in the adjustment.
The new sheath was cut to length, and routed with the end cap that came with the kit fitted to the clutch lever.  The ferrule was slid up tight and pulled tightly by hand with the adjustment fully retracted.  The cable was then kinked to one side indicating the correct length. I then manually made a birdcage shape at the end and soldered the ferrule in place.
The cable is now straight and pulls much easier through the nylon-lined sheath.