Tuesday, October 14, 2008

More mods...

Last weekend I did some more work on the Met. After fumbling with the Kitaco CDI I bought for a week with no luck, I took the CDI and my met down to the scooter shop in Orange where I bought it. I left it there a couple days and it looks like they created a new wire harness for it. I will get some pictures of the CDI wiring up shortly.

Besides the CDI we fabricated a new cover for the radiator. I found an old piece of punched metal grating laying around rounded off the corners and made a box out of it.



I also wanted to do something different with the rear blinkers. I like the look of the standard Met "bullet" lights but I wanted to move them in closer to the body. I was looking into modding the standard lights and removing the black rubber spacer but my dad came home with a little present from the Long Beach car swap meet.

For $10 he picked up a set of what turned out to be Harley Davidson lights. They are the same bullet shape but a little less deep so they can sit closer to the body without having to shave anything down. They are also chrome metal as opposed to plastic. We fabricated some longer mounting brackets and I cannibalized the wiring from the original lights. I'm pretty happy with how they came out. It makes the rear look more narrow and the light cluster reminds me of a retro future rocket.



I have all the parts on order to replace the airbox and do a rejet. So, I guess that's the next project.

Monday, October 6, 2008

The Ratropolitan

Most of you may have heard that I had a little fender bender on my scooter. I was side swiped in a hit a run riding to work on October 4th, 2008. My scooter took a little damage and was covered by my insurance. After I got the scooter back from the shop I decided to repaint all the old pieces and swap them back out for the new ones. I also did a ruckus swing arm conversion, installed the front basket, replaced the stock mirrors with bar end mirrors, rebuilt and moved the gps mount and some other little things. Here are the picture of the new scoot. It still needs some fine tuning but it's getting close. Eventually, I am going to have it pinstripped as well.

The next projects are to redo the cover for the radiator, fix the rear brake line, modify the air box, and rejet.

For now I am dubbing it "The Ratropolitan". Over time I would like to make it look more and more like an old school rat rod.