This is a continuation of my previous blog post Resilience – A Motorized Bike Build
After nearly four months of struggle and pain, Resilience finally runs.
This has been one of my hardest and most fulfilling projects yet – from a simple mountain bike to an easy and affordable ride to school. In this final blog post on my masterpiece, I’m going to go over what I had to do to get the thing running and what kind of upgrades and modifications I’ve made since then.
An issue with compression
Now I’m not 100% sure why I faced this issue, but I was having compression issues with my engine. I’d spin the thing up and it would turn over until I heard a big POP – smoke would come out from the engine & the thing wouldn’t start.
After a few days of debugging, I zeroed in on where this problem came from – compression. The big gasket separating the two halves of the engine was blown, and the entire engine needed to be taken apart & a new gasket installed.
This was a four-hour process that involved a lot of trial and error and parts from a secondary engine a friend had given to me as a gift. However, I was able to successfully replace the big engine gasket and put the engine back together.
The bike finally ran.
This was a huge moment for me. Not only could I ride this bike to and from school, it was a huge achievement and proved to myself that I could truly do anything I wanted, if I dedicated myself to it.
Upgrade time!
If you’re already well-versed in motorized bikes, you’ll notice I already have an aftermarket exhaust and cylinder head installed.
The exhaust install was less for the performance boost (though I do appreciate the extra speed), and more as a clearance fix. The stock exhaust that comes with most motorized bike kits wouldn’t fit on my bike, and my pedals would run into it while trying to pedal. This aftermarket exhaust not only gives me better performance but provides no clearance issues.
The cylinder head actually came with my Stage 4 Racing kit. I just put it on because I had it lying around, and I figured it’d give me better cooling & performance.
The carburetor & offset intake were necessary to be able to fit my carburetor onto the build. However, I ended up upgrading the carb pretty quickly…
OKO Carburetor!
After a while, I noticed my engine was running too rich and I had an air leak between the carburetor and the intake manifold. This caused the bike to barely be able to idle and it gave it very spotty performance. I decided to upgrade to the OKO 21mm carburetor + a reed intake. I purchased these parts off BikeBerry.
The parts easily fit my bike, but kind of got in the way of my pedaling. This was no problem however, as I would barely have to pedal after installing these components. This solved my rich mixture & idling problems immediately, and gave me so much better performance and speed.
A Happy Ending.
Those are all the upgrades I’ve done so far for Resilience. I’m really happy with how the bike turned out, and I’m more than ready to move on to more projects from here. However, there’s always that voice in my head telling me to add more. We’ll see what happens from here 🙂
