Moped Rally Report - Portland

Did you know you can fit a whole moped in the back of a honda fit? I did. 

This last weekend was the Portland Moped Rally, titled "There Will Be Blood" and so me and some friends took our bikes down the coast for 100+ miles of riding. I usually strap my bike down in my car by lowering the handle bars, taking the front fairing off, and using a single strap along the center and wedging the wheel between the seats, but this time I decided to get extra straps as I was leaving town, and that kept the bike in place pretty well.

Seattle to Portland is usually an easy 3 hours, however traffic gets snarled between Fife all the way down to the air force base. Last time I went to a portland rally it took an extra hour and a half of travel and i barely made the first ride. This year I left way early and it still took an extra hour.

The rally itself was fun. I participated in the Friday fast ride and the long Saturday ride. Making a ride for a rally is a bit of an art and the friday ride is usually the chaotic and fast one. We went up and around the hills west of Portland and around a lot of curvy turns. At some point my bike's pipe got very hot, maybe because it was clogged, but I could feel the heat off it. At one point I looked down and it was glowing red hot and I had to stop. Pipes aren't supposed to do that. At the gas stop about 15 minutes into the ride I adjusted my carb's float needle and took a plug out of my pipe. The pipe on my bike is an Estoril sidebleed, which has a moderatly sized expansion chamber with the exhaust coming out of the middle of the chamber instead of the end. There's a removable plug at the end which seems to do absolutly nothing other than make the pipe really hot by trapping all the air in there so I got rid of that and it didn't melt.

Bike sorta ran randomly bad all weekend. On Saturday's long ride we stopped at a small town southeast of portland and I had probably one of the best pizza slices I've ever had, the place also sold day old slices out of the fridge for $1. Amazing shit. Then I found a copy of Race Drivin for the gameboy at a random antique store.

A friend of mine who used to work at Magic Touch Mopeds in seattle said that my issues might be the gas fizzing inside the carb because it's bolted directly to the engine, and the vibration was causing air bubbles which would cause the bike to randomly sputter. he said I should try to brace the carb with my foot to keep it from doing that, so I did and it was noticably less worse (?) haha. I felt like I could really wring the bike out for once.

Our Saturday part spot was at the QHut, which is some kind of garage venue in Portland. They set up a ramp, a hot tub in the truck of a bed, they had a DJ, they served cold beer and water out of a child's pool. I met up with a friend from an internet forum I'm in and they are trying to re enter socity after being so isolated, and the bike party was really the thing they needed. 

This was a very Portland rally, I was glad my bike didn't melt down. Portland is very cheap compared to Seattle - I got coffee for less than $5, I got breakfast for less than $10. Every time I'm down I feel like moving because the food is a lot better, things are cheaper, it has the same mountains and climate as Seattle...etc.