Roughhouse 50 Wisco build

[Zino]

What size rims do you have on there.
I have a new back tire for you if you have the 12 inch rim .

[RH50Wisco]

I have the stock for 2015, so the 10s.

[wiscootsin]

i'm guessing you're in the general madison area? if so, you can probably pickup a roughhouse at a local salvage yard if you didnt want to repair bent forks,etc. students abandon these. I picked up one that was previously owned by a star running back. lol

[RH50Wisco]

Yes, I have thought about going that route if I had to. I am pretty far along on this restore now and I'm not sure any of those units would be in much better shape, but thanks for the suggestion. This bike I am restoring has been owned by 3 different Badger football players. The original owner now playing for the Raiders, the next owner just entered the portal, and the third/final is some local talent that recently graduated.

[RH50Wisco]

Roughhouse gas tank install and rear fender install with Yasuni R:

I'm starting to get things put back together now. Still waiting on parts for my throttle/cable so putting the back-end back together. I decided to clean and repaint the gas tank since I had it off. Also installed the right-angled petcock and am much happier with the fuel line routing with that one. The lever is on the inside of the bike but I can still get a finger up in there to action it.







Installing the rear fender brought up some interesting issues. This fender is secured on the left side by a couple of bolts into tabs on the engine case. On the right side it was secured to a spot on the stock exhaust bracket. The new Yasuni bracket does not have these mounting holes. It also doesn't fit the same so the steel bracket that is bolted to the fender doesn't even line up correctly. The new exhaust bracket is closer to the fender by about 1/4 inch. To resolve that I just added another bolt between the new exhaust bracket and the mount point on the engine case. That at least allows the fender mount bracket to have the space needed, but still lack the proper mount hole to fix it to. I will be happy to have only 1 bolt on the right for securing this. One hole lines up with an open area on the bracket and one is behind material, so looks like I can either drill new hole in the bracket or use the open area and see if tightening it down will be good enough. I think it might be as the fender is fairly secure already just from the left side mount points. Probably try that route first and see how it holds.

[RH50Wisco]

Roughhouse Dellorto 19mm racing carb initial set up:

I got her fired up for the first time this weekend. Had to tweak the idle speed screw just a bit to get it to run. It sounds really good, and really loud (didn't have the silencer on yet). It had really smooth throttle all the way through the range. 

My Dellorto clone racing carb came with the following:
    72 main
    W16 needle
    50 Slide
    Choke/Starter Jet - 60
    Idle Jet - 48


I changed it to the following for initial starting point:

    Main = 96
    W7 needle in slot 3 of 4 (on the richer end).
    Removed a bushing that was between the atomizer and main jet.

Without the silencer installed on exhaust it had really smooth and responsive throttle. After putting on the silencer I get a bog at early throttle, so now the tuning fun can begin. I will assume that adding silencer is putting more back pressure on exhaust which would cause a rich condition which is right where I want to be for a starting point. Now I just need to wait for the weather to improve a bit so I can do some road testing and final tuning.

I also have a few more things to put back together before taking on the road so I will tune as best I can on the stands while putting the rest back together, but getting really close at this point. 

I have done nothing with the CVT yet so still have that to dig into before finalizing.

[RH50Wisco]

Roughhouse horn switch:

1/4/2023: edit to fuse info below

As I continued to work on putting the front dash/handlebar area back together I discovered the horn was not working. This seems to be a fairly common problem and not a lot of posts on it so thought I would document the Roughhouse system.

Step 1 was to determine if horn was bad. For this I just ran a jumper wire from the battery positive to the terminal on the horn with the green/yellow wire. 




I was able to get it to beep with the hot jumper so on to the switch. The first thing I did here was use the multi-meter to see if I had juice at the green/yellow wire at the switch, and I did. This is the terminal on the right in this pic. Next I used a jumper wire to make connection between these two terminals, this resulted in a beep so definitely a problem somewhere below these two terminals. 




Next step was to take apart the switch to see what I could see. This is all held together by 4 screws, 3 you can see in the above pic, 1 other is kind of hidden under the wiring harness. I didn't see any obvious signs of corrosion or anything broken. In the pic below the red arrow points to the contact surface that the hot terminal on the other side of this plastic goes to. There is an insulator between that and the spring and base. All areas pointed to by the blue areas are what close the circuit and are connected to the left terminal from previous pic. This includes the spring, spring base (which is what the wire is soldered to), and contact point embedded in button.



I didn't really know what to do at this point to get it working so I just took a needle nose pliers and twisted the spring a few times. Horn works again, so I assume the twisting removed some kind of corrosion crud between the spring on one of the bases it sits on. Now time to put it all back together again. Make sure to take note of the order the plastic pieces go together. The blinker switch will not work right if it isn't put back together properly, ask me how I know that. I took this apart and back together a few times before getting it right. You should put the high-low beam switch in first, then the tab for the blinker switch goes on top of that, then both mount points for the horn switch go on top of blinker switch. You can see all that in the below pic.




Another word of advice...make sure you have extra fuses because good chance of blowing it a few times going through this troubleshooting. It takes a 15A/250V and is the shorter size. The regular size you get from the auto store is too long, but can work in a pinch for troubleshooting, but you can't close the case with longer one. You can buy a 5-pack of the auto size (longer) at auto store for about $4, or go on Amazon and get a 200 pack of various amps and sizes for $10 which will include the shorter length that is needed for this fuse holder.

New edit: I received the 200 pack of fuses from Amazon and they do not fit, so those are going back. The short one is also thinner. Original fuse is 6mmx25mm, standard auto fuse is 6x32, standard short version is 5x20.
The correct fuse is referred to as a size 8AG 15A/250V, and these are not so easy to find. For all the trouble I have decided to convert this inline fuse to a marine grade blade fuse. I think this will be a nice little upgrade.

Going with this:
    www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08JZ5C29C/
    www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08NSF2WXW/

[RH50Wisco]

I am pretty pleased with how the new fuse turned out.

[RH50Wisco]

I have still been working on this beast slowly but surely. Not in a huge hurry since weather is not great. This post is dedicated to painting the panels. There were enough scuffs and scratches on the hard plastic panels that I thought I would try my hand at painting. I bought a cheap HVLP spray gun (Campbell Hausfeld DH580000AV) and some supplies from HF. I decided to get the Spectrum Universal Paint System Starter Kit and I can tell you that this works with the Campbell Hausfeld gun with the Spectrum Paint System Adapter. Also went with a filter and regulator from Amazon.  

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0049FNOWS
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0748J812X
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BW9BX6D

www.harborfreight.com/universal-paint-system-starter-kit-17-piece-57508.html
www.harborfreight.com/spectrum-paint-system-adapter-57505.html?_br_psugg_q=spectrum

I bought paint and other supplies from Summit. I went with the Single Stage Gunmetal Gray Metallic (SUM-UP374Q).

I have never painted with a gun like this before and really wanted to give it a try. I think it all turned out really well. I have a couple of little boogers in the paint, but for what I am working with I am not concerned. I used my very old 13gal 4hp Campbell Hausfeld compressor and this setup was quite sufficient for this job. I wouldn't want to try painting a car with this, but for some small panels for a scoot it worked great. I did initial sanding of the matte black with 150 grit, then wet sanded with 400, did some putty to fill in gouges, did some spot wet sanding again with the 400, then primered with spray can, then did 3 coats of my single stage paint. Here are a bunch of before, after, and in-between pics of the process.




Tail piece before and after:





Side panels before and after:





A bunch of random stages:

[RH50Wisco]

Currently working on LED conversion. Will be posting all the details on that soon. 

[rollingbender]

Your paint work looks fantastic!!!😎

[RH50Wisco]

LED Conversion:

I finished off this part of the project last night. My goal was to remove all the stock blinker units as I don't really care for the look. They hang out kind of far and are just waiting to be broken off (at least in the back). I found one of the Ducati integrated knock-off units on Amazon and then found some very sleek units for the front.

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OYR46C8
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08V8BHLM4

These front units can come as either blinker only or blinker/running light combo. I went with the blinker only since I knew there wouldn't be stock wiring there for the running lights.

I did some test hookups just to make sure everything worked as expected before doing a more permanent install and immediately noticed that the blinky-blinky was extremely fast. Some research answered this pretty quickly. The LED blinkers don't provide enough resistance so the flasher goes too fast. To resolve this need to purchase these resistors.

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004EDF8HY

Wiring these is a bit strange, you tap one end into the positive and the other to the negative so it sits between the two leads that go to the blinker. I pulled the wire sleeve off the old blinker to reuse, then twisted the resister ends to each blinker end then capped off with new male bullet connector. In this pic you can see the new blinker leads coming out of the black wire sleeve and joining with the leads from the resistor which are the fatter red wires.




Here is a comparison of the look:




I have to say that the stock blinker is much brighter, but probably just due to the sheer size of the bulb. I still prefer the look of the LED better and there are probably other options that would work here if you really want a bigger/brighter LED. I have some short videos I took but will need to figure out how to post a video here.

To mount the resistors I secured them to the handlebar via zip tie. There are all kinds of warnings that these things get extremely hot and not to mount them next to plastic. I did the best I could to keep them from resting on plastic but is a little hard to do. I'm not too concerned here as I don't think the very quick and limited use of the blinkers will produce much heat.
 



Now on to the back. At first glance it seems like a direct replacement for fit and for the most part it is. The problem is this new unit has longer posts and are not threaded all the way to the base of the unit. This makes it so you can't tighten the nut on all the way for a snug fit. To resolve this I padded the posts with some rubber spacers I found. This was actually part of my broken center stand that will never be mounted to this bike again. I sliced it in half and used it on these posts.












Now for the wiring. Here is the wiring for this aftermarket unit:
Black (Ground) -> Black on bike. Stock wiring will have 3 grounds, 1 for each blinker and 1 for the brake light. You can use any one of these as this integrated unit only needs 1 ground). I used one of the blinkers just to save from splicing on another female bullet connector)
White (Running light) -> Yellow on bike. I checked the wiring diagram for this one and this yellow wire goes all over the place on the bike. It is a very low-voltage line and only measures about .5 volts.
Red (Brake on) -> Light blue on bike
Blue (L-blinker) -> Pink on bike
Yellow (R-blinker) -> Light brown on bike

The stock blinker wiring already has the same size bullet connectors so those just plug right in. For wiring the brake you need to chop off the stock connector that has the 3 wires (Black, light blue, yellow), then put female bullet connectors on the yellow and light blue and just plug everything in.




After this was done I spent the rest of the evening putting most of the bike back together and I will post those pics next.

[RH50Wisco]

Well, this has been a long and interesting winter project. It has been fun and consumed a lot of time. I started out with a $100 bike and now have about $1500 into it (and still more to add). My original goal was to flip it, but at this point I wouldn't make much (if any) and get none of my time back out of it. I will probably end up keeping this bike and selling my 2020 RH. I am very close to being done and just have a few more finishing details to complete. Need to test/tune the carb and also install the Polini variator. Need the weather to get a little warmer and no snow on the ground. My brake caliper rebuild does not appear to be holding as it has a slow leak somewhere. Pretty sure it was leaking before I got it so thinking there may be a crack in the housing somewhere. I will probably just spend the money and go with the NCY replacement caliper. I will also eventually need some new rubber so that is another expense I have to look forward to. Here are some pics of the mostly finished product.

[RH50Wisco]

This is a very quick attempt at posting some video of the LED lights. In the second video the last part of the clip is is slow-mo which is why it looks a little strobe-light like. I kept that in there because the clamp I was using to hold the brake lever on falls off so you can see the difference from brake on to just running light.

[jbjhillbilly]

That looks so good! For sure a keeper after all the work you put into it.