Icy Bliss

Well-Tuned Engines

Ice on the puddles No snow — engine well-tuned Life lived to teen fullest

Sweden in the early 1960s saw an invasion of light motorcycles called mopeds, basically motorized bicycles. The minimum age to ride one was fifteen, and pretty much every boy in town wanted one as soon as he reached the magic moped-age.

By law, mopeds were allowed to reach speeds only marginally faster than walking — after all, they were (mo)torized (ped)estrians; that is to say thirty kilometers an hour (Km/H). Faster than that and the cops would (and did, having nothing better to do) get you.

The way that some manufacturers of these 50 cc toy-motorcycles, including the Austrian Puch and the German Zundapp, made sure the things did not break the moped speed limit was to restrict the gasoline supply by installing a plug with a much narrower channel than the supply line itself — once in place, even at full throttle, only enough gas would reach the engine to keep the thing within the speed limit.

Puch and Zundapp mopeds were designed and built for their respective domestic markets where they could legally go 50–60 Km/H, but to sell in Sweden they had to be strangled. Plugged, is what we called it.

From what I understand, and remember, these plugs could not be altogether removed, they were welded in place, but they could be drilled so as to widen the channel, and, voila, the bike could now reach the 50 or 60 Km/H speeds it was made for, and in some instances even more than that (if you knew how to really tweak engines).

Drilling the plugs (appropriately enough we called those mopeds “drilled”) was seen by the authorities as more illegal than breaking the speed limit, so if your moped was drilled and you were caught, well, to say that your dad would have a crap day would illustrate the point.

To fix this, i.e., to make sure you did not accidentally do 50 Km/H in normal traffic (say by keeping up with the cars in town), where the cop could spot you, some of the smarter kids (or their smart dads) installed an adjustable valve in the fuel line with two (unmarked) positions: “legal” and “drilled”.

My friend Leif’s dad was an engineer; he was also a believer in going as fast as you could (within reason). He drilled Leif’s Puch and also installed that legal/drilled valve with the promise from Leif never, ever to drive with the valve in drilled position in normal traffic, only on out of the way, rarely if ever patrolled roads.

The teen image that brought this Wolfku about was a long, remote stretch of road where Leif and I had gone one morning in April, me on a bicycle, and he on his Puch with the valve in legal position. Once we reached this great stretch of road, however, he flicked the valve to drilled and took off. Sixty, easily.

Then he returned to where I was waiting with my bike, to let me have a go.

Oh, man. This moped kicked serious behind. Eyes teared, the world seem to fly by. I gunned it all the way up to a small incline where the more built-up area began, and where you could be if not spotted by the cops at least reported by some law-abiding (and supposedly well-meaning) citizen, then back to a waiting, now a little anxious, Leif.

This image surfaced during a recent chilly morning’s walk, the puddles here and there from recent rain almost but not quite, iced over. Air so fresh, the sky so high. That’s when the Swedish stretch of road and Leif’s Puch arose, for I had been equally alive that morning. I had noticed the ice on the occasional puddle, and the now almost snow-free fields surrounding. The air so crisp and clear, and the engine so very well-tuned, ready to break the crippling law in a flash.

Nothing profound, just a very alive early teen morning.

© Wolfstuff