Most bikes and scooters have certain limitations to both their speed and performance. However, like any stock car driver knows, these limitations can be modified and enhanced. Dennis McCartney of CBX Man took me on a tour of the parts that he uses to “uncork” the power of the scooter.
My first question was: Why not just buy a more powerful scooter or move into the higher-powered automatic bikes like mine? That’s when Bonnie Galang, a customer who just had her scooter “uncorked,” showed up to pick up her supercharged scooter. I asked Bonnie why she wanted her scooter to go faster.
“It was going slower and slower,” she said. “I ride this to work and down to my aunt’s in Hazleton. That’s why I wanted it souped-up – to keep up with traffic on the freeway.”
I can’t imagine riding a scooter on 81.
Then I asked her why she didn’t just get a bigger bike.
“I don’t like stick-shifts,” she said. “I’m happy with this; I’ve had it for four years, and I love it!”
This was completely different from my approach. When the 400 got to be too tame for me and I wanted to keep up with the big boys, I went out and bought a 650, which I’ve had now for more than a year and still love, realizing that this is the limit to which I want to go. No soup for me.
OK, so how does one soup up a scooter? According to Dennis, there are two sides of the bike that you can work on to increase performance; it all depends on what you are looking for. The two sides are the A side — clutch and variator, which influences how fast the bike takes off, and the B side — the carburetor and exhaust system for horsepower.
The A side of the bike includes several parts. One is a CDI, which allows the engines to rev out. Some are adjustable. There is also a racing coil.
“It attaches to your sparkplug and creates more power from your sparkplug to the bike,” Dennis said. “That’s what makes your scooter go faster”.
Dennis showed me three different types of weights that go into the variator.
“As your scooter is driven, the weights inside your scooter move,” he said. “The weights go up and down. This is what changes the speed on your scooter. This is how it manages to shift gears without shifting gears.”
He then showed me the weights that he had changed on Bonnie’s scooter and explained that these weights do wear over time, and they develop flat spots.
Dennis went on to explain that the breakthrough in the last couple of years with regard to weights is that “the roller weights have been reinvented. Dr. Pulley came out with weights that are called sliders which are much higher performance and extremely more durable compared to the old weights. There is another company called Turbo Max that has come out with pillow weights. … You can improve the performance of any bike just by changing the weights.”
He instructed me that when “changing the weights of the rollers, the rule of thumb is to put in lighter weights, (which) means faster acceleration, less top end. Heavier weights mean slower acceleration but better top end.” Translated, that means that “if you’re strictly city, you go with lighter weights, if you’re strictly highway, you go with heavier weights.”
Still on the A side of the bike, Dennis explained the other thing that’s done to enhance performance.
“We change the clutch,” said Dennis. “We can change these springs in here. This is what influences how fast your bike takes off the line. People with larger displacement bikes don’t need to change their clutches; it’s really the smaller displacement bikes, up to 250 cc, that really benefit.
“It’s really the (B side) of the bike where you make the horsepower that makes the bike go faster,” he added.
This is where he “uncorks” the bikes.
“When we put an aftermarket pipe on it, we take the carburetor apart and put in a bigger main jet in it. Even the little 49 ccs, we put a bigger main jet on it, and that’s how we get them to go faster. They get more gas and more air through the high performance air filter and less restriction on the exhaust. It’s classic hot-rodding applied to a scooter.”
And CBX Man wants to be the scooter high performance shop. If you want to know about your bike’s performance, I suggest that you check in with Dennis.
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