As I would soon find out, this was the easy part. I started separating the pieces from the body. Every nut, bolt, rubber piece, etc. received a label and was put in a plastic bag for safe keeping. My boyfriend, Paxton, seasoned tinkerer and former Expert Tire employee, labeled them things like "rear fender left wing nut" whereas mine had descriptions like "stick thing to weird bolt on side." But, hey, we got there, and eventually everything was taken apart and had a legible label, at least to me.
Next, I began to prime. Primer is important because it sticks to the metal and the paint sticks to the primer. For this part, I used Rustoleum spray paint. We built a small painting station in our backyard out of old tarp and pvc pipe so that the overspray could be contained. I hung the parts from the ceiling of the tarp station using string and zip ties and began to paint!
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| Painting Station |
I had to paint in shifts, since there was a limited amount of space to move around once there were some pieces hanging. So once the first batch was dry from a couple of coats of primer, I painted them yellow. For this section I used Paxton's paint sprayer and bought a pint of yellow paint. I mixed the paint with paint thinner to help it come out of the sprayer more smoothly.
Once they were dry enough to move, they were placed on the high-tech shed gutter hanging station, and in went the next batch. This went on for a couple of days until it was finally time to paint the body. Since the body is too heavy to hang from those strings, I hung it from a tree and put a tarp up behind it.
Next it was time to take off that awful black and red paint on the engine. I scrubbed for what felt like days with paint thinner, sand paper, dremel, or whatever else I could think of. Eventually, I got some pretty great results.
These aren't the best progress pictures but I was too focused on getting it done that I forgot to take photos. Eventually, all parts of the engine looked like the beautiful chrome you can see!
At last the paint was done! Now it's time to put it back together. This was much harder. Even though we had everything labeled, it took time to make the proper adjustments to put everything back together perfectly.
At the end of this stage it was just the body. There were no handlebars, engine, electrical, brakes, lights, etc. All that would come later.
Running total:
| PARTS | |
| Moped | $200.00 |
| PAINT | |
| Primer x3 | $15.00 |
| Yellow Pint x2 | $20.00 |
| Yellow Spray Paint x2 | $10.00 |
| Paint Thinner x2 | $14.00 |
| Sand Paper | $8.00 |
| TOTAL | $267.00 |
This is the cost at the end of step one. Next post, I'll show how I put the new engine on. Current status of the moped is not running unfortunately. After getting it to run for a couple of days, it died on me on my way home. I played around with it a bit and I can't figure out what's wrong. Today, I'm going to take it to Wick's Wheels, a local moped shop, and let them fix him up. I'm disappointed that I'm not able to complete this on my own, however I think the fact that I got him to start and run at all is impressive, so I'm happy with that! I'm limiting my car use to once a week, or for moped related reasons (such as taking it to the shop today).
Hopefully it'll be running next week!
Thanks for reading!
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