Chapter 2 - Moving Away, Planning, and Starting
After chopping it all up, it did get a nice layer of phosphoric acid (Prep-n-Etch), because I knew I would be moving soon, and probably wouldn't work on it for a while. I was right about that.
I moved to Colorado in August 2015 to live with my now-wife. This meant the "mopeds are job one" life would be ending, and compromise would be introduced (bye No-nos! Thanks Kim and Sam and Brad and everyone else for helping me get prepped and moved).
Basically, things sat for almost another year, but once settled in I came up with a sketch for the build, literally:
I then moved on with the initial fab work. First step was to build some new motor mounts. By this point I had ordered wheels, sprocket, axles, brakes, spacers, etc., but it was kinda tricky to confidently get everything placed and spaced, when I had neither a mounted engine for spacing the sprocket on the axle, nor an assembled wheel/axle/brake/sprocket to space the engine. It was highly iterative, with lots of dimensional stack-up to calculate the correct spacings on both wheel-side and engine-side (I wanted better than just eyeballing it).
If you notice in the before/after photos of the chopped up frame, the big vertical motor mount plates were cut back quite a bit - this was in an effort to get the output sprocket as close to the swingarm pivot as possible (vertically and longitudinally) to ensure the best chain geometry.
Anyway, the motor mounts ended up being sorta simple, 1/8" bar stock and like 1/2" x 1" rectangular tubing from Home Depot, some doubled up to get the right spacing:
