Greetings.
I think you might like this tale, and so I will tell it to you.
I first started looking into mopeds way back in 1985 when I was about 15, since they mostly do not require the entire automotive hassle-world of insurance/inspection/registration/tags/emissions/etc.
I am sure many moped riders know and revile that hassle, it often being a factor in their choice to "live the way", as it might be called.
Buying a moped was my answer to "Catch-23", getting a job that demanded a vehicle, but did not pay enough to even pay the insurance for a car, much less allow anyone to buy or maintain one.
And so we went out bought a used Puch Austro-Daimler single speed, and the
next day I took it out to get a feel for driving it, having driven cars
before, but mostly my ten-speed.
For a ten-speed pusher to "upgrade" to 50cc's is like a wish-fulfillment fantasy come true, all those places it took half an hour to get to, were now five-ten minutes away.
I must have ridden that thing for 10 hours straight, around town, doing slaloms in the parking lots, just cruising...oh I was hooked.
That bike got me my first halfway decent job, but was eventually stolen by someone who lifted the entire rack it was chained to into a truck while I was at work.
Talk about a crushing blow.... even worse was knowing who stole it and having the cops refuse to do anything about it, and threaten to arrest me if I went and took it back.
(Mind, I grew up in and around Baltimore, which is not "user-friendly", and nor are the cops - it's a very rough town, even though DC gets most of the whining about violence.)
I wound up with a car, which I hated, and I mean really hated..an 82 Dodge Aries which threw the belts every 300 miles, broke down every 500, and blew the entire transmission 5 days after the warranty ran out.
The real clincher to me was one look at my budget, 85% of my income was going into that damn car, parts, insurance, etc..
That was it for me, I gave the stupid thing to my sister and bought another Moped, a 1988 Tomos Golden Bullet.
Once again a better job followed, and the bike was stolen, this time by someone who knew exactly what they were doing, getting past an alarm and bolt-cutter resistant chain. (I suspect the shop who sold it to me was stealing them back and simply re-crating them till they weren't "hot" anymore, but they're out of business now)
After that I purchased an old Tomos Silver Bullet, and ran that for a while, till I had it in the shop for repairs, and the guy running the shop got busted for stealing/chopping bikes - they never found mine.
I moved, and bought another bike shortly after, a 1989 Tomos Top-tank Golden Bullet, and put some mod-work on it, and oddly enough, got a new and better job.
Now Baltimore, it's not a safe place to ride a moped, you have to duck bricks and bottles, the occasional four-wheeler who gets it into his head to play games with you, smash-and-grab equivalents of bike-jacking, jerks who'll throw a rope across the road, all kinds of crazies, you-name-it.
The bike was nicely tricked out for it though, took the wire mesh off an old dart board and converted it into a headlight protector, bundled the cables behind it, and covered the front end from handlebars to the fork tops with heavy-gauge screen from an old patio door.
Pulled the exhaust baffle, added a pair of reinforcement bars to the frame, worked on the engine, carb, etc, and added a seat of leather saddlebags, a regular road-war special.
Didn't stop with the bike though, standard gear was open-face helmet, combat boots, and a suit of upper body motorcross armor underneath a very tough snowmobile suit, weather is part of the experience, I don't stop riding when it pours down rain or snows, I get out there and right in it's face.
This worked out well, too, one of the best things about riding a moped is that you are not so isolated from the world around you, even with a motorcycle, the speed factor tends to cut you out of the picture, and cars are even worse, it creates their own little world where they pay no attention to anything but themself, which is why a lot of folks drive like idiots, they aren't looking at you, and would not see you if they did.
That bike was a regular champion, ran me to work five days a week, to severna park on saturdays, and to annapolis on sunday, burning a hundred miles a week or more, and hanging in there all the way, summer heat, winter snow, it ate it up and came back for more.
Right up till August 6th 1992, that is.
One of the bad things about a moped is that to make a left turn, you often have to pull out into the intersection itself, in order to see around the oncoming vehicles in the other left turn lane, and since you need a bigger hole with the limited acceleration, you often also have to deal with some jerk blowing his horn at you, cause *he* thinks that hole is big enough for you. (Don't you just wanna get off the bike and go strangle those dorks?)
So, sitting in the intersection, the light goes yellow, everyone stops.
You and I know there isn't any backing up on a moped in that situation, and sitting there is even dumber, so you *have* to go - and I did. Only problem with that, is the lady who happened to be motoring down the "hammer" lane and spotted the yellow just as it turned.
The van in the left turn lane I had pulled out to see around, also blocked her view of me from that angle, all she saw was a yellow light and a clear lane to her right, so she did what most four wheelers with a patience problem do, she pulled into that lane and punched it.
End result - T-bone collision at combined speed of 70+ MPH.
Front end of her car nailed my bike and right leg, sent both sailing into a gas station parking lot about 30-40 feet away, me, consciousness and the bike taking separate paths along the way.
I got pretty much wrote off as a DOA..so did the bike, but I wasn't giving up on either one that easy.
I wound up fighting the medical establishment tooth and claw for a couple years, lost the leg due to it, but in the meantime, I had a project - resurrecting the bike that served me so well for 3 years.
The frame wasn't really a lost cause, but I didn't have the tools to pull it back out and straighten it, ironically, those reinforcement bars prevented the fuel tank from busting open, which, combined with that slide when we landed, might have been a nasty recipe for burns - score one for foresight there.
I had a collection of spare and alternate parts handy, since I was working on rebuilding two other bikes at the time, and I dug into that to find enough pieces to put this baby back on the road.
The base rear frame was a red 74 Tomos-Koper, ugly but solid enough, so I dismounted the A35 engine/transmission from the wreck and slung it under there, and in about five minutes, managed to actually get spark and fire it up. (My neighbors all gave me strange looks after my reaction to that, taking a page from ole doc frankenstein with the cry "It's Aliiiivee!")
After a bit more digging, I had to settle for the front end of a silver-blue 78 Puch maxi, and most of the electricals I tore off the frame of a destroyed Yamaha of unknown identity, rest of the bits and pieces I took from anything I could get that would fit.
Frankenstein was about right, this thing was a mongrel-monster, but it ran and it ran solid, even though the collision had cost the engine a muffler and stripped out one of the cylinder bolts.
I ran that till the electricals failed completely other than the ignition, and for a while ran the lights off a 9.6V Ni-Cad RC car battery I'd charge overnight, that would run the lights for the hour or two I would need them.
Just as that bike began to start really falling apart, (right along with me, having no medical care/coverage) the medical stuff came through and I managed to get a Tomos Trike for about $300 from a local who did restoration on them.
Now that, was a sweet piece of machinery, especially to someone down to one leg.
All I needed to ride it was a pair of working hands, it had a big wire basket behind the wheels and I stretched a bungee cargo net over it, made short work of grocery runs, long as you weren't buying eggs.
Instead of shocks, the rear part was attached by two metal bars, and the only shock absorption back there were springs under the seat, and that ain't much, not on put-hole-ridden city streets.
I never understood why that Trike was such a target for thieves and vandals, but it was...I spent an average of once a week trying to repair the damage from attempted thefts, and the vandalism from those who realized they were never going to cut through the "drawbridge chain" I used to make sure it stayed where I put it.
They'd try to steal it, get mad when they couldn't, and would damage it, often in plain sight and broad daylight...police response was a lost cause, they damn near arrested *ME* for running one of them off with a crossbow leveled at his head.
That was what finally did it in, the vandalism, one of them tearing it apart and setting it on fire while I was in the hospital getting some more repair-work done on me.
It also convinced me in part to move the hell out of that town, I moved up here to michigan not too long after that, just east of detroit, in the farmington area.
As of this writing I just got back from a 350-mile round trip to buy another set of wheels, out in holland, michigan, a little red suzuki fa50, with a spare bike I haven't yet decided to rebuild or strip for parts.
I ran across your site while looking for another bike, and was pleasantly surprised to find someone in this state who understands the nature and mentality of the serious moped-rider, so few do.
So greetings from farmington, they call me Ree, and that is my tale.
And if that makes me what you'd call a Decepticon, well then, it's a title I'd bear with pride, and the next obnoxious four wheeler or brick /bottle thrower who gets a taste of my favorite bit of chain is gonna hear the cry.
Don't fuck with the Decepticons!
May your wheels always find the right path,
Ree. |
