I have 4 mopeds in various states of disrepair and I keep thinking of making an electric one. The frames are really robust, there’s a lot of knowledge and parts out there, I’d just need to buy the stuff and bolt it together.
Prior to getting one it was really difficult getting around seattle, because you either needed to take 2 busses and wait 20 minutes per transfer, which meant going about 5 miles took 30-40 minutes, and you were still stuck in traffic.
But after I could just…go places and not worry about parking. I’d hook it up to a bike rack. They’re fast enough to keep up with street traffic. The only downside is the 2 stroke motors require constant maintenance and I have 4 bikes in various states of disrepair, each one requiring me to order and install some fucking part, like a clutch cable or whatnot.
i woulda been glad if this thread was here when I was still in h-Town, but I’m in the sburbs of KC now so I got a vehicle and I’m not liking that I do.
Damn this is cool as hell. One of my old roommates back in the Bay Area was an older guy who used to build electric motorcycles and gas mopeds in our garage and rip up and down the street with them to test them. He had so many of these vehicles and they were all also busted up and he was terrible at repairing them because, AFAIK, some of them were actually basically vehicles of his own design. (He owned a small business where he built camera drones for the government and large industrial farms. He was a very weird roommate.)
I am always jealous of the extremely large front lights that mopeds and motorcycles have. The light on the front of my new bike is really strong, but not very large. The Urb-E had a tiny little light that I plugged directly into the battery with a USB cable. A lot of the electric vehicles seem to be holding back on the lights in an attempt to avoid draining the battery, but I’m like: shit yeah drain my battery! Absolutely blast my battery and gimmie the biggest light in the world! I tootle around after dark all the time and I want people in the rich neighborhoods I pass through in Mar Vista and Santa Monica to shudder with fear as a shard of the goddamn sun wails down their street at 9 PM.
Yeah my husband has a removable one that he takes with him when he locks the bike. (It is so powerful that we also use it in the home as our main flashlight.) The one on my new bike is bolted to the frame and hooked up to the bike’s electrical system so removing it would probably just break it
in addition to my motorino and my suzuki and my wife’s aventon I am vaguely planning on getting a hyperstrada at some point in the next few years but I think it’s sort of wasted in this climate so we’ll see
hmm, I wonder if he knows the guy who started Onyx motorbikes, they were an emoped maker in the bay area that used a lot of moped parts (like front forks and brakes) and I know a few people who ride them.
the thing with mopeds is you can make them go very fast with very little money and so eventually you end up with a 50mph slovanian built bike
i have a tern hsd that i purchased using facebook’s catch-all stipend for everything from childcare to fitness equipment and since i wasn’t planning on being there by the end of this year i figured what the hell
it’s REALLY nice even though it looks really dorky most of the time. the really cool part is how much it can fit on the rear rack and how little that affects anything about the handling and pedaling. once we get ash comfortable with wearing a helmet we are 100% taking him on bike rides with us because it’s compatible with thule child seats
this club later got voted into the Moped Army as an official branch, and another member had their Subaru Loyal reviewed by this guy, which I knew because it had a Portland “Puddle Cutters” club sticker on it.
Group riding is so fun. here is a very blurry non-identifiable picture I took from last year
dad has had the normal K75 (the normal one) for more than two decades now, and has put a bit more than 100k KM on it, so if it has been serviced well, only 28k are leaving a lot to be driven.
The three cylinder engine is more engaging than the four cylinder K100 (and you can discern both by looking at the exhaust, 75 has a trochoid pipe, 100 a quadratic one… except if you count cylinders, but nerrrrdalerrt), since it supposedly was used in some formula sports series (75bhp from a 750ccm machine were quite snappy in the days/1980ies).
Also if you look closely, it has an Universal Joint instead of a chain,
so it has a distinct sound you’ve probably not heard before/often.
My dad checks and replaces the valve platelets himself, that is easy to do on this engine (or so he says, i do absolutely have no experience with other motorcycles whatsoever).
All in all, he’s very happy with it, been very reliable, so there’s only one thing he’d change, here’s the Big However then:
The 75 is heavy though, like really heavy… it’s a german tank in a way. If you check it out in RL, you should see if you can handle that weight, since i guess that damaged bodywork may have been it falling sideways? idk, i know that it def would be too heavy for me to put it on the kickstand, but ymmv, as always.
Also note that you can get replacement parts directly from the factory, so my dad literally drives to BMW classic department and picks up parts from the OEM, importing them might be difficult and expensive, whereas it has been a steal for him.
That’s all I can contribute/learned from listening to his experience.
Executive dysfunction and the prospect of having to go through a licensing process/road test are probably my biggest hurdle. Melissa would hate it. But if it was just a little mini-bike for tooling around on side streets…
yeah, I won’t lie, this part was excruciating – made somewhat worse by canada being less willing to rubberstamp driver’s license holders who complete a weekend motorcycle safety course than, afaik, most US states are (here you have to take a whole other test on top of that) – it took me three tries to pass my driver’s test when I was 16 and even though I haven’t had a single incident in 18 years mostly because I drive like a schmuck and I prefer to drive like an unobserved schmuck, this process went about as well, but it was still extremely, extremely worth it.
I really feel like most people who get upset about the amount of road space we dedicate to cars, their unreasonable expense, the many essentially boring qualities of the cars we are obliged to use 90% of the time, etc., should just get motorcycles instead of complaining about it
also, if you do go through with this, even if you’re pretty confident that you don’t want Too Much Motorcycle, I wouldn’t learn on anything smaller than a 250cc Suzuki – almost nothing under 700cc is genuinely hard to handle, and it’s not great to get used to riding something that’s super underpowered.
Groms are cool ofc! but I would get a midsize beater to start, there are few downsides
