Done, and Done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just finished my last final!!! Bring on the summer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Motion Wet!!!

Our rally was a success even though it rained! Well, at least we finally built a successful human pyramid!!! Friday on the ride out to the shop I soft seized my engine, spent the afternoon cleaning up the cylinder and putting it all back together. Then it died in the rain on the night ride and wouldn't start the next day for the long ride. So I borrowed Amy's swinger which proceeded to be its own record as the slowest Puch ever made. So then I borrrow a Sachs that gets me up to the campsite fine but dies half the way back. I ride in the chase van. Back at the shop I get the Puchavus running again and sieze the engine again 10 minutes into the ride to dinner. So I get towed with my belt behind Nate's Hobbit and set the latest speed record on the Puchavus: 42 mph... That's when the clutch engaged.... I thought my arm was going to fall off. So now the Puchavus has a siezed engine, no drive chain, and a clutch that's got something seriously wrong with it... WOOOOOOOOOO!!! But really, I wasn't being sarcastic about how great our rally was. i think everyone had a blast. And hey, I'm rebuilding the ZA-50 anyway! and that cylinder needed to get out of the way of my new 74 Metra!!! Katching!!!

Sadly, we all had to say goodby to Responsible Jon who is moving to Seattle... I'm gonna miss ya! Blood Drive IV here we come!!!!!!!

Rain and petcocks...

So Puchavus has been running fine since Whiskey Business. She doens't really like the rain at all, but some different kind of carb filter might help... Alao the rear brake is barely working so I guess I need to either take it apart and see whats wrong or just salvage one off a batavus in the back of the shop. Also there is some curious metalic dust gathering on the chain... I can't see in places where it's rubbing though.

I started her up tonight to ride to the studio and spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out if I was grounding out somewhere, then checked my fuel switch- it was off... I love and hate that feeling.

The velocity stack (bicycle horn) should be in by now so I can rig that up Sunday as we prepare for our rally, cleaning the shop, getting the firepit ready, marking the road for the quarter mile races, reviewing the ride, etc.

My targeted 42mph was a bit of a stretch on this stock cylinder, although I really can't complain (35ish maybe a little more isn't bad), but plans are now to throw on a 74cc Metra kit whenever Benji gets some back in stock... Rippin'!!!! I figure a Metra kit is my best bet as I want a kit with a bit more endurance than a sprint kit like a Polini since I'll be riding 12 miles to work at the shop over the summer. Mid 50's would be awsome, but I don't know how realiable it would be if I did a lot of porting. Heck, I'll probably do it anyway...
So that means a new carb (21mm?). And even more importantly, a SEAT. That piece of metal is about as comfortable as it looks: not at all, but then Burt Munro would be proud.

On the downside I definitely won't have her kitted by Motion What?, but she's plenty fast for a midwest rally.

Here's Something From My Current Project

Une Hotel en Paris...



This is an alternate version for the portico based on a chimney out of Vitruvius Brittanicus

On a Differnet Note

Oh the joys of website translators... I found this juicy tidbit on a Spanish site - Los Secretos del Inmortal Nicolas Flamel about a book called The Magician.

This is drama:

"Californian Its. In the hands of Dr. John Dee and the Dark Elders, the book of Abraham the Mage could pisses the destruction of the world ace we know it. The most powerful book of all Time, it holds the secret to eternal life. To secret one dwells dangerous than any man should to ever hold. And Dee is two pages away from the knowledge that would bring the Dark Elders into ultimate to power. His only obstacle? Josh and Sophie Newman - who plows 8.000 thousands away. Its Paris. After fleeing Ojai, Nicholas, Sophie, Josh, and Scatty emerges in Paris. The City of Lights. For Home Nicholas Flamel. Only this homecoming is anything but sweet. Perenell is still locked up back in Gannet and Paris is burning - with it, the last hopes for the human race. Nicollo Machiavelli, collector author immortal and celebrated art, is working for Dee. He's to after them, and Time is running out for Nicholas and Perenell.Every day spent without the book they age one to year - to their magic becomes to weaker and to their bodies, dwells frail. For Flamel the Prophesy is becoming dwells and dwells to clear. It's for Time elementary Sophie to learn the second magic. Fire Magic. And there's only one man who dog teach it to to her. Flamel's old student The Comte of Saint Germain - alchemist, magician, and rock to star. Josh and Sophie Newman plows the world's only hope. If they don't turn on each to other first."

Ok we laugh, that was funny. Somehow they translated mean as pisses!

But this is what it would read if it were really translated:

"Its California. In the hands of Dr. John Dee and the Dark Elders, the book of Abraham the Mage could mean the destruction of the world as we know it. The most powerful book of all time, it holds the secret to eternal life. A secret more dangerous than any one man should ever hold. And Dee is two pages away from the knowledge that would bring the Dark Elders into ultimate power. His only obstacle? Josh and Sophie Newman - who are 8,000 miles away. Its Paris. After fleeing Ojai, Nicholas, Sophie, Josh, and Scatty emerge in Paris. The City of Lights. Home for Nicholas Flamel. Only this homecoming is anything but sweet. Perenell is still locked up back in Alcatraz and Paris is burning - with it, the last hopes for the human race. Nicollo Machiavelli, immortal author and celebrated art collector, is working for Dee. He's after them, and time is running out for Nicholas and Perenell.Every day spent without the book they age one year - their magic becomes weaker and their bodies, more frail. For Flamel the Prophesy is becoming more and more clear. It's time for Sophie to learn the second elemental magic. Fire Magic. And there's only one man who can teach it to her.
Flamel's old student The Comte de Saint Germain - alchemist, magician, and rock star. Josh and Sophie Newman are the world's only hope. If they don't turn on each other first."

I think I actually laughed harder! Rock star? Machiavelli?

I want to read this book and I don't care if a computer translates it. I'm sure it will be equally funny either way.

Puchavus Pictures!!!

Well, Here she is with tires. I hope to have some better ones of how she looks with the carb and on the ground soon.

Here's a not so good picture of the Puchavus in action.



In other news, I got hit by a truck three blocks into the ride at Whiskey Business, the Bourbon Bandit rally in Louisville this weekend. It was a flagrant example of road rage and just goes to show how careful you have to be on two wheels. I ended up 20ft from my bike on my back with asphalt scratches on ye olde casque, which means somersaulting stunts where enjoyed by the spectators...

Thank God for helmets! Definitely time for a full face... Oh and the Puchavus is OK... just another dent (more character)in the tank.

The Puchavus Lives!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It took all of last night, but at about midnight Devin pushed me while I put my hand over the carb and she fired right up.

The tires came in yesterday. Not just 2.25" Savas, but very fat 2.50's that are very angry. I could never have imagined how awsome this thing looks and feels.

For some reason it has almost no first gear and yet great acceleration. Not much in the way of top end, but this is all without tuning, rejetting or the Simonini. I'd say she'd topping out at about 32 mph. I'm pretty sure it won't be that hard to get this thing going in the low to mid forties.

It feels like there is some piston chatter and somethings up with the transmission, but she runs!!!!

Pictures soon...

And, More On the Puchavus...

Well, now it's getting to the point where everything just comes together. I got the intake back from the welder on Friday- It's retardedly awsome, as I already mentioned. Anyway I bored out the base-plate today, and though I messed it up a little bit it wasn't anything that a dremmel couldn't fix. I cleaned up the piston, painted the cylinder and got that all bolted up with the high comp. head. It feels like the compression is awsome!

When I mocked it up with the Simonini exhaust the result was wild. The intake and exhaust form this awsome curve through the cylinder. Whether or not people like how this thing looks, I can't help but think it' going to be the wildest moped of the season.



The frame does look a little top-heavy at the moment with the seat and tank, but with some fat Savas on those rims I think the whole thing will come together. I think it should be called the Burt Munro Special

Then I ran all the cables. And boy it's starting to look like a bike now. The cables really tell me it's almost done. It had better be! Whiskey Business is this FRIDAY!!!

Now imagine this with a velocity stack...



All that's left to be done is get the tires in and installed, do the wiring, install the drive chain, finish up the seat, adjust the cables and hope this thing runs...

I'm bank'n on 42 mph...

The Puchavus ...continued

So, the Puchavus will come to life... someday. Actually, that day draws nigh. On Tuesday I spent all day working in the shop. I repacked my wheel bearings, and discovered that I don't know where my front break hub has gotten to. I hope it shows up, especially since I put a good deal of time into making it all shiny.

Peter and Sarah from the Ghost Riders came in and we went over to get some of their stuff welded and picked up my and Devin's frames. Good Lord! When Devin told Rex to put some hefty welds on my engine mounts Rex took him seriously... Their awsome.

I also got Devin to show me how to port my engine. We raised the exhaust mainifold and opened up the intake mainifold to 17mm to match my carb. Then I went in and smoothed it all out and shortened the piston skirts.

Next, I found a bent piece of aluminum piping, and (after removing the bushing from my carb and shimming it up with a coke can) had a pretty sweet intake manifold, although it is monstrously long.

Then Devin had the fabulous idea of putting a velocity stack on the carb instead of the normal filter. A velocity stack is a horn shaped piece of metal that smoothes the air flow going into the carb and apparently (from what wikipedia says) manages to reclaim some of the vaporized fuel which is pulsed back out the carb when it is running at full throttle. (The main thing is that it just looks awsome and will probably make my carb louder than my engine...)

This is what I'm making my velocity stack out of.

Yesterday I went in and began putting the frame together. I also went out and got a toggle kill switch which I mounted on the speedometer plate.

I just placed the order for the chain and Simonini exhaust(expensive!) So I'm hoping thos will be in by Sunday... maybe. 2.25" Savas... well, we'll see.

The Carburator with its velocity stack and rediculous intake is going to be the most conspicuous part of this bike. I don't think people are even going to notice that its a Batavus while they wonder who the tard is who mounted his carb 12 inches from the cylinder. Plus it's only going to be a 50cc bike! Myabe I'll run a kickstand, but I'm pretty sure I won' run pedals at all, seeing as I don't have a pedal sprocket hooked up. I'm just going to pick up some pegs which should be a lot more comfortable. Right now without tuning I'm hoping for low to maybe mid 40's for Whiskey Business.

Burt Munro

What can I say? I recently watched "The World's Fastest Indian" with Anthony Hopkins. What a fabulus story.

Here is the real man in action.

"Anybody can buy a fast bike and go fast. I think it's far more enjoyable to make a slow machine go fast. Riding it is only a hundredth of the actual esxperiance needed, I think myself, although it can be pretty hairy at times too, you know."

Why'd You Break Your Moped?

Hell's Satans Rally....

The teaser:

The Saturday ride gets underway

Hells Satan, Broped and Motion Left.

Bandit Love

The Bandit's Chill Host, April.

My Most Recent Project: An Architecture Foundation

This project was a school of architecture in the Gold Coast of Chicago. I had already designed the Orangery (tea house/cafe), and chapel. This was the culmination of the project, and my first multi-story building.

I had a lot of fun with the perspectives.

Here is the street facade.

And the garden facade.

The plan.

And the context.

Wartime Author Mystery 'Solved'

From the BBC News

A former Luftwaffe fighter pilot may have ended the 64-year-old mystery surrounding the death of French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

The author of The Little Prince disappeared during a wartime aerial reconnaissance mission in July 1944.

In 2004, wreckage from his plane was found off the coast of Marseilles, but there was no indication of how he died.

Now former German pilot Horst Rippert says he fears he may have shot down the author - though he cannot be sure.

I presented myself as doing research and he said: 'You can stop researching now because I shot down Saint-Exupery'

French newspaper Le Figaro has published extracts of a book in which the former Messerschmitt pilot describes spotting a twin-tailed Lightning P-38 plane flying below him.
He went in pursuit and shot him down.

"I didn't see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to know that it was Saint-Exupery. I hoped and I still hope it wasn't him," he said.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was best known for his book The Little Prince, a fantasy about a prince from an asteroid who explores the planets.

But his other works focused largely on his experiences in aviation. Although he moved to New York after the Nazis occupied France in 1940, he returned to join the Free French air force in Corsica.

His disappearance became one of the most enduring mysteries in post-war France.
Eventually, a bracelet belonging to him washed up in a fishing net off Marseille in 1998 and debris from his plane was later found by French diver Luc Vanrell.

With the debris was the engine of a German plane shot down a few months earlier.
Mr Vanrell then set to work with Lino von Gartzen of the Bavarian Society for Underwater Archaeology.

Mr von Gartzen told the BBC News website that he made 1,200 phone calls to former Luftwaffe pilots and their families in search of the man who shot down the French writer.

Finally, he was told about a man who had a clear memory of the events of 31 July 1944, the date Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappeared.

"I presented myself as doing research and he said: 'You can stop researching now because I shot down Saint-Exupery'."

Lino von Gartzen said it came as a big shock: "I never thought I would find who shot him down. I was quiet for some minutes as this was too much for me".

For another two years he continued to check Horst Rippert's story and is convinced by it.
"From my point of view as a professional historian it's a very, very good hypothesis and everything he told us seems to be true.

"He feels guilty and very, very sorry about it. He was very scared that the cheap press would massacre him."

In the published extracts, Mr Rippert describes being a fan of de Saint-Exupery's work. "In our youth, at school, we had all read him. We loved his books," he said.

After the war, Mr Rippert became a sports journalist. He is now 88.

Funny Games

I've been thinking about it and I've come to the conclusion that ridiculing the "bourgeois pigs" in their SUV's and ranch houses could be the ultimate sign of progressive modernity. That's what all the modernist architects, from Le Corbusier, to Walter Gropius, were most opposed to (and afraid of) in their architecture.

Wallen recently brought to my attention the new movie Funny Games starring Tim Roth (who I am a big fan of) and Naomi Watts. Apparently this is one of those sort of Eli Roth films were innocent people are subjected to all kinds of hideous torture. However, there is apparently something else going on as well in the film.

I think it is this mocking of the "bourgeois" inside us that is what this critic is talking about. The critic is telling us that in its very eschewing of the pornographic qualities of such films as "Hostel" and yet STILL finding that masochism titillating, it is nothing more than an exercise in ridiculing that well-off, middle class set who live in the suburbs, have a nice TV and get off on "Saw 8." Mocking that and yet still exploring the same fascination is perhaps worse than just participating in the mass bourgeois stupidity and blood thirstiness.

Now, if this movie is trying to point to the fact that this sort of gladiatorial blood lust is really nothing better than pornography than maybe it is good. That is perhaps what a good movie in this genre would do: point to the fact that it is evil. I guess we'll just have to see the movie then, won't we?

Is there still such a thing as a bourgeoisie in America or are we really all afraid of that thing inside each of us that doesn't get the new trend, or is to slow to keep up with our progression into post-post modernity?

A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names

From the New York Times March 11, 2008

By J. MARION TIERNEY *

During his 1969 concert at San Quentin prison, Johnny Cash proposed a paradigm shift in the field of developmental psychology. He used “A Boy Named Sue” to present two hypotheses:

1. A child with an awful name might grow up to be a relatively normal adult.

2. The parent who inflicted the name does not deserve to be executed.

I immediately welcomed the Boy Named Sue paradigm, although I realized that I might be biased by my middle name (Marion). Cash and his ambiguously named male collaborator, the lyricist Shel Silverstein, could offer only anecdotal evidence against decades of research suggesting that children with weird names were destined for places like San Quentin.

Studies showed that children with odd names got worse grades and were less popular than other classmates in elementary school. In college they were more likely to flunk out or become “psychoneurotic.” Prospective bosses spurned their résumés. They were overrepresented among emotionally disturbed children and psychiatric patients.
Some of these mental problems might have been genetic — what kind of parent picks a name like Golden Rule or Mary Mee? — but it was still bad news.

Today, though, the case for Mr. Cash’s theory looks much stronger, and I say this even after learning about Emma Royd and Post Office in a new book, “Bad Baby Names,” by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback.

By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).

The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.

“They were very proud of their names, almost overly proud,” Mr. Sherrod said. “We asked if that was a reaction to getting pummeled when they were little, but they said they didn’t get that much ribbing. They did get a little tired of hearing the same jokes, but they liked having an unusual name because it made them stand out.”
Not too much ribbing? That surprised me, because I had vivid memories of playground serenades to my middle name: “Marion . . . Madam Librarian!” (My tormentors didn’t care that the “Music Man” librarian spelled her name with an “a.”) But after I looked at experiments in the post-Sue era by revisionists like Kenneth Steele and Wayne Hensley, it seemed names weren’t so important after all.

When people were asked to rate the physical attractiveness and character of someone in a photograph, it didn’t matter much if that someone was assigned an “undesirable” name. Once people could see a face, they rated an Oswald, Myron, Harriet or Hazel about the same as a face with a “desirable” name like David, Gregory, Jennifer or Christine.

Other researchers found that children with unusual names were more likely to have poorer and less educated parents, handicaps that explained their problems in school. Martin Ford and other psychologists reported, after controlling for race and ethnicity, that children with unusual names did as well as others in school. The economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt reached a similar conclusion after controlling for socioeconomic variables in a study of black children with distinctive names.

“Names only have a significant influence when that is the only thing you know about the person,” said Dr. Ford, a developmental psychologist at George Mason University. “Add a picture, and the impact of the name recedes. Add information about personality, motivation and ability, and the impact of the name shrinks to minimal significance.”

But even if a bad name doesn’t doom a child, why would any parent christen an infant Ogre? Mr. Sherrod found several of them, along with children named Ghoul, Gorgon, Medusa, Hades, Lucifer and every deadly sin except Gluttony (his favorite was Wrath Gordon).

You can sort of understand parents’ affection for the sound of Chimera Griffin, but Monster Moor and Goblin Fester? Or Cheese Ceaser and Leper Priest? What provokes current celebrities to name their children Sage Moonblood Stallone and Speck Wildhorse Mellencamp?

“Today it’s all about individuality,” Mr. Sherrod said. “In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still try.

“I can’t tell you,” Mr. Sherrod said, “how often I’ve heard guys who wanted their kid to be able to say truthfully, ‘Danger is my middle name.’ But their wives absolutely refused.”

Is it possible — I’m trying to be kind to these humor-challenged fathers — that they think Danger would be a character-building experience? Could there be anything to the paternal rationale offered in Johnny Cash’s song, the one that stopped Sue from killing his father: “I knew you’d have to get tough or die, and it’s the name that helped to make you strong”?

I sought an answer from Cleveland Kent Evans — not because he might have gotten into fights defending Cleveland, but because he’s a psychologist and past president of the American Names Society. Dr. Evans, a professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska, said there is evidence for the character-building theory from psychologists like Richard Zweigenhaft, but it doesn’t work exactly as Sue’s father imagined it.

“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

After hearing that, I began to reconsider my own name. Although I’d never shared Sue’s Oedipal impulse — I realized my father couldn’t have anticipated “Music Man” — I’d never appreciated those playground serenades, either. But maybe they served some purpose after all. So today, to celebrate the Boy Named Sue paradigm shift, I’m using my middle name in my byline for the first time.

Also for the last time. As Sue realized when it came time to name his own son, you can take a theory only so far.

* This article is written by John Tierney

The Aroma of Tea

Balance

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

Neil Neches, on a No. 5 train, underneath the placard that has earned him plaudits for his proper use of the semicolon.


By SAM ROBERTS
New Yo9rk Times February 18, 2008

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.

But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.

In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.

“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.

One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction.

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”

Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”

New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.

The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.

A Weather of Feeling

Poets are often intelligent men and they are entitled to their thoughts; but intellectual pioneering and the construction of new thought systems are not their special function. Aeschylus's Oresteia was not a contribution to Athenian legal theory; Dante's Comedia gave us no new theology; and Shakespeare's history plays added no fresh concepts to the political thought of his time.

What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from abstraction and submerge them in sensibility; it embodies them in persons and things and surrounds them with a weather of feeling; it thereby tests the ability of any ideas to consort with human nature in its contemporary condition. Is it possible, for example, to speak intelligibly of angels in the modern world? Will the psyche of the modern reader consent to be called a soul?

Richard Wilbur from the essay On my own work

The torment of waiting for parts

So, I still need:
The Za50
The Moto-Matic "San Francisco" exhaust
The Vintage Cosmo "bumstop" seat
The boost bottle
The motorcycle headlight
And the tear-drop trailer tail light

Most importantly, I need the seat so I can weld up some mounts for it. Then I can send the whole thing off to be welded (as in professionally).

Finally, Pictures of the Puchavus

So this weekend some folks from the Ghost Riders and the Guns came down to the shop and we spent all day Saturday and Sunday working on bikes. I was in the zone so to speak. I mocked it up and it certainly looks mean, although it is very, very small, and ever so low to the road. (notice the size of the concrete blocks)



Devin and I (read Devin) tack-welded the engine mounts to the frame, I drilled them out and the engine seems to fit very well. The chain even seems to allign better than I could have expected (with the too-good-for-measurements stance I took on fabricating the mounts). Here's a not so good picture of the mounted engine showing the offset from the frame (and Motion Left welding prowess).



I cut the drop bars short to fit the original Batavus grips and levers which are really appropriate lookin. Next I made a speedo mount out of sheet metal, set slightly to the side. I will wrap this in checkered tape in classic cafe bike form. I also ground off the headlight mounts as I would like to put a larger motorcycle headlight on, plus if I end up getting clip-ons it wouldn't have worked with the mounts.



Overall, the look is far better than I had expected. I'm almost falling in love with the rough, unpainted look it has now, although it will look better powder coated black, especially with the seat. With fat racing flats this thing is going to be downright scary, or at least as scary as something that's about 2 and a half feet tall and 4 feet long can be! Oh, and with a Homoet-style exhaust it is even better.


Prepare to be destroyed by 50 ridiculous Puchavistic cc's!

Borromini's suicide

I have been wounded like this since about half past eight this morning and I will tell you how it happened. I had been feeling ill since the feast of the Magdalene [22 July] and had not been out on account of my illness except on Saturday and Sunday when I went to S. Giovanni [dei Fiorentini] for the Jubilee. Last night the idea came to me of making my will and writing it out with my own hand, and I began to write it about an hour after supper and I went on writing with a pencil till about three in the morning. Messer Francesco Massari my young servant ... who sleeps in the room next door to look after me and had already gone to bed, seeing that I was still writing and had not put out the light, called to me, 'Signor Cavaliere, you ought to put out the light and go to sleep because it is late and the doctor wants you to sleep.' I replied that I should have to light the lamp again when I woke up and he answered: 'Put it out because I'll light it again when you wake up'; and so I stopped writing, put away the paper on which I had written a little and the pencil with which I was writing, put out the light and went to sleep. About five or six I woke up and called to Francesco and told him to light the lamp, and he answered: 'Signor, no'. And hearing this reply I suddenly became impatient and began to wonder how I could do myself some bodily harm, as Francesco had refused to give me a light; and I remained in that state till about half past eight, when I remembered that I had a sword in the room at the head of the bed, hanging among the consecrated candles, and, my impatience at not having a light growing greater, in despair I took the sword and pulling it out of the scabbard leant the hilt on the bed and put the point to my side and then fell on it with such force that it ran into my body, from one side to the other, and in falling on the sword I fell on to the floor with the sword run through my body and because of my wound I began to scream, and so Francesco ran in and opened the window, through which light was coming, and found me lying on the floor, and he with others whom he had called pulled the sword out of my side and put me on the bed; and this is how I came to be wounded.

(taken from Anthony Blunt, Borromini, pp. 208-209.)

Francesco Borromini would die as a result of his self inflicted wound. He was buried in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, as the brothers at San Carlino (where he had wished to be buried and had spent much of his life as the architect) would not permit a suicide to be buried in their church.

Bundles of Inconsistency

"If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!"

Jonathan Swift

Very true, but I also think that there is much in a man's inner heart that is unmoved by time and age (probably to his detriment). Perhaps it is the willingness with which we allow ourselves to change, that is constant.

Well put, Mr. Walton

August the 9th, 1683.

In the name of God Amen. I Izaak Walton the elder of Winchester being this present day in the neintyeth yeare of my age and in perfect memory for wich praysed be God: but Considering how sodainly I may be deprived of boeth doe therfore make this my last will and testament as followeth. And first I doe [declare] my beleife to be that their is only one God who hath made the whole world and me and all mankinde to whome I shall give an acount of all my actions which are not to be justified, but I hope pardoned for the merits of my saviour Jesus.--And because [the profession of] Cristianity does at this time, seime to be subdevided into papist and protestant, I take it to be at least convenient to declare my beleife to be in all poynts of faith, as the Church of England now professeth. And this I doe the rather, because of a very long and very trew friendship with some of the Roman Church.



Me too! I mean, I'm not neinety...

Puchavus 50cc Cafe Racer... continued.

As of sunday I have finished grinding out the frame to fit the Za50. I also fabricated six engine mounts to be welded to the frame. The steel I used was quite thick so there will be no risk of the engine torquing off!

The engine mounts on the right side of the bike all have to be shifted out slightly, which made for some interesting work. I did this by bending the metel in a vice. I ground the corners down around where they will be bolted to the engine.

The order for the seat, simonini exhaust, boost bottle, Sava 2.5" tires and engine will be going out this week.

Next will be the fabrication of seat mounts, and getting everything welded.

And then the powder coating....black. And then, well a lot.