Fun_People Archive
13 Sep
Legend, Urban or Otherwise

Date: Wed, 13 Sep 95 23:59:31 -0700
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Legend, Urban or Otherwise

Forwarded-by: Chris LaFournaise <cjl@sequent.com>
Forwards removed...
From: moike@netcom.com (-Mike Hardcore-)

Ok, some of you may think this is total BS, but I can get the scooter for
visual inspection from the squi^H^H^H^H friend I sold it to a couple years
back shortly after this... mind you, thanks to him, the scooter is staying
together only due to the plethora of 'No Fear' stickers covering its
plastic nowadays...

OK, the story goes...

I had been running a pretty hot 73' Malibu running a pretty tight .30 over
smallblock 350 with the a-typical aftermarket street package... cam,
manifold, double-pumper, headers, digital ignition, roller rockers, gear
drive, and so on... its amazing what you do when you're 18 and bored.  So
I had this 'sneaky pete' cheater NOS system I picked up from a friend who
used to work at a local speed shop layin' around collecting dust in my
garage.  I had originally intended to install it in my Mali' as to properly
get myself seriously killed.

So I'm bored after putting a new plug in my Yamaha 180 (freeway legal oOoO.)
'Riva' scooter... (don't laugh, I could cruise 65 WFO on the slab, and I
had it decked out like a mini-goldwing, rear matching box w/passenger
backrest, windscreen, it was even that gold-metalflake goldwing color...
mind you 65 on the freeway was not for the timid) and it was running fairly
decent... and I noticed that the little thin silver bottle of NOS could be
installed in the forward compartment with hardly any mods aside from
mounting the brackets and drilling a hole for the line... So I got to
work...

By the time I was finished I had a NOS bottle mounted in my forward
compartment, the horn button button wired into the solenoid switch for the
bottle... and all the plumbing tucked neatly away under the bodywork leading
back to the carb, and a nifty little fogger nozzle tapped into the side of
the throttle body.  And all the accessory crap stripped off so it was down
to the bare-bones scooter, no box, no windscreen, nothing...  After thinking
about power to weight ratios and how small the back tire on the scooter was
I tucked away the scooter without testing it and went back to grumbling
about how my current bike, a Suzuki Savage was a load of crap and started
to sort things out on it...

A bit later my girlfriend at the time decides to dump me on Easter Sunday,
so I yank the scooter out from under the tarp in the garage and decide I'm
going to go do some scratching on it to blow off some steam (note: bad idea)
and after a brisk run thru the hills, I am over in the back hills of
Milpitas (I live in the SF Bay Area for those who are wondering 'where the
hell is Milpitas?') and there is this really long straight wide stretch of
road that runs along the base of the foothills... and I'm sitting there at
the bottom of the hills after my run looking at the long stretch of empty
road and thinking about the bottle in the forward compartment... 'What the
hell' I think to myself and open the forward compartment and crack open the
bottle...

So I get WFO on the scooter (not too uncommon a throttle position on a 180)
and at around 45 or so I lean a bit forward and jab down on the horn
button... well, there is this noise quite similar to what a hoover makes
when you first switch it on, and this sudden grenade-like burst of all out
power... and it feels like I just punched the 'deluxe-hyperspace' button.
At this point my sphincter is clinging tenaciously to the upholstery of the
seat and I am coming over a rise at a unbeknown rate of speed (speedo
topped out at 75) right into the sights of a motorcycle cop who is sitting
at the end of the street with a radar gun pointing right at me.  So I let
off the horn button, get on the binders and waive to the cop, and just pull
up right next to him and start to take off my helmet...  and he is just
looking at his radar gun, looking at me... looking at the radar gun...
looking at me, and he starts to laugh... this big massive raw-meat eating
cop is just looking at me and laughing... now my sphincter is trying to bore
a hole thru' the seatpan.  Eventually he calms down enough to ask me how on
earth I got a scooter to go so fast, and I told him that I had just tuned
it up and I played with the carb and put in a hotter plug (thank the gods
I did not put on those big NoS stickers) I told him the story of my
girlfriend dumping me and that I was feeling a bit bad and I was really
sorry for blasting down the road that fast... He couldn't hold a straight
face for more than 30 seconds to yell at me so he wrote me a ticket for 10
over the limit and told me to not ride when I was upset... he was still
shaking his head and snickering when I rode off.

That was the first and last time I used the NOS on the scooter.  I consider
myself lucky, and nobody believed the story in traffic school either... then
again, I was in a roomful of cagers.

I sold the scooter to a friend (minus NOS gear) shortly after that, and he
munged it on the freeway in true squid-fashion... (sigh)

Respectfully, 

Mike

OBScootwithNoS: 'You must first be young and stupid, 

                  before you can be old and wise.'

© 1995 Peter Langston