Velo Solex Times Two

[cheesy]

Originally Posted by Ascot500

What is that car in the background?

Car? If you mean the the green thing with the red fairing, that's a 2007 Ural Gear Up side car rig from Russia. More fun than you are legally allowed to have and, like a Solex, a butt simple machine.

[lokie56]

I had a Bitsa VeloSoleX that was part early 1960's frame and 3800 engine that I found at a garage sale in boxes for $60. It was fun, they do get nearly 200 MPG. It was my favorite garage sale shopper, slow little bike for a lazy summer weekends cruising backstreets and alleys for estate and yard sales.

[lokie56]

Originally Posted by cheesy

Never thought about polishing the piston top. Worth a try.

Mufflers. See the round black things next to the front wheels?

Them's mufflers. Believe or not but the exhaust pipe is 6mm. Header pipe is 13mm. My understanding is that the Hungarian Impex muffler is prized for it's 16mm header pipe and 8mm exhaust. All I know is that purchasing and importing an Impex would cost more than I spent on the bikes.

BTW I have an extra Impex muffler..

[cheesy]

Wow, almost 3 years.
I've been messing with these stinky little turds recently. Actually, quite a bit. They are great for cruising our 'hood and very cheap to run.

I recently fit a bike cyclometer to the 77 and got that calibrated. No easy task as the goofy French tires are not listed in the ETRTO charts and a pain to mount the sensors. I did find out that I can hit a fear inducing, GPS confirmed, 19.1 mph on the flats.

The 73 is in the process of getting LEDs head and taillights. No easy feat, either. First task is to convert the weird (read:French) lighting coil AC output to DC. Probably the easy part. Second is to make that DC usable. That takes some soldering. The output is not 6vac, it's 28vac. That is another can o' worms. Rectified DC is 1.41 that of AC, so somewhere in the neighborhood of 39.4vdc. When not taken into consideration, the smoke gets let out.

That was a 470uf cap, rated at 25v. Since replaced with a 470uF rated at 250v. I want this board overbuilt.

I tested ver.2.0 on the Solex yesterday and got a steady 28vdc between the cap and the 7805 regulator, which is the weak link in the system. It's rated at 35vdc. It works well, but a lot of heat. May survive, may not.

While digging around in my electronics drawer, I found this.

I think I bought this when I was dealing with the temp gauge voltage regulator on the Maggot years ago. I didn't use it because of the size. It's pretty big. Inputs and outputs weren't marked, either. I'm going to trace the 'puts this afternoon and see if the works a bit better. If nothing else, it doesn't look like a 4-H project.