the kinetic tfr project

After getting some email from a nice guy in Sweeden (Johan), I was told that the Kinetic TFR was marketed and sold in Sweden under the name “Baghee”. I am not sure what the word means in either Swedish or Hindi. Here is what Johan had to say about them:

I don’t think they are being sold still, mine is from 1996, and it doesn’t seem they are very common either. They where sold by some company in Gothembourg called “indo Motors” but I don’t they are around any more.

So here is my TFR as of right now. It is sort of in a pile in my garage. I have been trying to find the time to work on it lately, but work/family obligations are keeping me. I am also in the middle of modding a Vespa Bravo, Grande and a Puch Maxi that won’t go faster than 22. The maxi is the only one that runs right now.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I bought a case splitter from an eBay store called “sportingforless.”

I also have another call in to Mike, the parts manager at Cosmo. Hope he has some better news than last time. Or at least returns my call. That would be a start.

Anyway, the splitter looks like this:

And the arms fold to accomodate different engines - thus making it “universal.”

In order to get it to fit the Kinetic (or vespa) engine, I needed some additional hardware that I got at the Home Depot. It was 3 bolts, 3 aluminum spacers, and some washers:

The bolts are metric M5 or as home depot calls them “5mm (head) .8 (thread size) 50mm (length)”. The spacers are 10×5/16 x 1″ (length). This combo was right on the money as far as size goes. The trick with this splitter is to get the arms above the engine mounts and the crankshaft inside the splitter’s center cylinder with enough space to thread the main bolt in (if you don’t use the spacers, the crankshaft is too long for this splitter).

The final mod was to drill a shallow hole in the main splitter bolt at the bottom. this is to keep the crankshaft centered inside the cylinder as you are cranking the splitter down. Ideally it should come to a point, but oh well. I used a 3/8 inch bit for that one. And when I say “used”, I mean “ruined.” Rest in peace, 3/8ths. It was a good run.

The whole thing looks like this:

And when mounted on a case, looks like this (vespa grande engine pictured here):

Here is where the spacer has to clear the engine post:

So I pretty much knew that this would end in disaster, but I did my first round of port maching/boring a little while ago. Not that you really get “rounds” to do this. Smitty from smc uses the phrase “boat anchor” on his site in several places to describe a crank case that was incorrectly ported.

I was trying to increase the airflow through the intake manifold and took a 1/2 in drill bit and drilled the thing out. Unfortunately, this messed with the fundamental engineering of the engine. The crank opens and closes the port as it spins. Messing with the shape of the intake port on the inside like this results in a back pressure disaster, causing gas to be ejected back through the carb and into the airbox. Needless to say, it no longer runs, but dang, there was a TON of gas and air going into that thing. And then back out again. Through the back.

So I have that going for me. I sent Smitty an email about it and he said:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I have a really bad feeling that you’ve ruined the crankcase half that has the intake… after seeing the inside of the crankcase, I’d think that it’d be a miracle if you can get it to run again using that crankcase.

I got a tip from a moped tuner in Denmark (Arndt - who has been incredibly helpful with tuning info) about a product called durafix. You can apparently use it to correct some mistakes and replace metal on your case. I am interested in doing this even though I have a couple of extra vespa cases that I could use for the kinetic. I will be sure to shoot some video. Meanwhile, check out the video on the Durafix homepage if you can. Thanks again, Arndt!

I mentioned in an earlier post that I didn’t have my mix right a while back and my engine soft seized. I was driving down the street and then the whole thing just locked. the engine stopped, and i started to slow down like someone slammed on the brakes. As I was decelerating, I looked down and noticed that my rear wheel was still spinning with the road and not skidding. What was happening was that the drive belt was slipping around the clutch.

A soft seize occurs when a piston heats up faster than the sleeve and expands until it breaks the “oil film” layer and gets pinched in the cylinder. I think that this was pretty minor and can be salvaged just fine. There were four places where the piston stuck. Here are some photos of the damage:

When it seized, I was running a Malossi 70cc kit, a Proma Circuit exhaust, a Dellorto 13.13 SHA carb with a #62 jet. I had it wide open and was doing about 40 and still climbing.