MOPED ARMY

Hi,Wayne! Here's the best way to tell your true speed.Find a flat stretch of road with mile marker postings.Go by the marker at exactly 30 mph and click your stopwatch or mark the seconds on your watch at exactly the point you passed the marker.If you hold the bike at a steady 30 mph(it takes concentration but it's worth it)you'll pass the next mile marker in two minutes.If you feel like going on,go to the next marker keeping it at a steady 30 mph and of course that will total 4 minutes.When you do this you can also on the return trip check your odometer because they're not always off the same percentage as the speedometer.Now say it takes you 126 secs. to run the mile.Then your speedo is off(registering too fast)by 5% I think.You just have to figure the percentages.BYE!

That's an interesting suggestion that would be true - if your tire is low you would read a higher speed than actual.

My experience is that there is a fundamental problem with the speedometer design. It's basically a magnet that spins inside a little "cap", that is attached to the speedometer needle. As the magnet spins it creates edy currents in the cap, that pull it in the direction of rotation. The problem with this is that the pull force doesn't increase the same as the spring force that pulls the needle to zero (there are losses in the edy currents at high rpm and the spring force is not the same the more you unwind it). I've noticed that up to about 25-30mph it's correct, but when you start doing 55-65mph my speedo reads 65-80 mph. I'm assuming that my moped behaves the same way (although I haven't tested it) because they use the same speedometers, just different drive gears and face plates.

Hi,Mike! I appreciate your suggestion,but most of us don't want 2 speedos on our bikes and a lot of us want the original equipment look about our bikes,like the motobecane Huret,which is a good looking speedo.Also the Tomos and Motomarinas have nice ones.The thing I don't like about the digitals I have for my bicycles is mine are hard to read at a glance because the read-out is small.But I'd say if a person can't make his speedo read correctly,it's possible the speedo is worn out.There's a spring which can get weak that the needle is hooked to and it will vary with temperature and fail with age sometimes.BYE!

I have a tomos targa and i also feel that my speedometer isint reading accurately. I was thinking about getting a derbi's dash installed into my Targa's but I dont fare enough. I think that my Targa may read in km/h (its a 2001 targa fyi). But i KNOW that it can go faster than 33 kmh with a 110 lb. guy on it. So it must be MPH. Ahh, who knows really what the new targas read?

Wisky