2000 Aprilia Pegaso

As seen in this thread down in Sprockets, I picked up a Pegaso that hasn't run in a while.  What's a Pegaso?  It's a relative of the BMW F650, but with a different cylinder head and suspension, and is generally intended to be a go-anywhere, do-anything sort of bike.  This one's a 2000 model, with dual Mikuni BST33 carburetors, and is supposed to look like this:  

Unfortunately, at the moment it looks a bit more... abstract.  A Pablo Pegaso, if you will:  

The story for how this one came to be in many pieces in the corner of my garage is sort of interesting. Here's an approximate timeline:

-Original owner purchased bike new in Alaska and rode it year round (!) with studded tires and some sort of gnarly heated gear that was wired directly to the stator (!!).  Made many "Alaskafications" including bypassing nearly every safety interlock and emissions component (this is a good thing, because Italian bike).
-Second owner, guy I bought it from, purchased bike from original owner and rode it all over Alaska.  Then moved to Minnesota, brought the bike with him, and rode it all over most of the other states.
-Bike sold to third owner, who rode it some more, and eventually parked it, allowing the carbs to become gunked up.
-Second owner purchased bike back, removed and rebuilt carbs, and generally started bringing the bike back to its' former glory but then... life happened.
-I bought it.

So, what I have is a somewhat rare Italian bike which has seen serious offroad time and was disassembled a while ago.  But, it has what feels like not-blown suspension, what sounds like good compression in the engine, and an expensive Arrow exhaust.  At some point most of the plastics were repainted silver over the original blue and some of the wiring is interesting, but all seems well when the ignition is on.

The guy I bought it from seemed trustworthy, so here's all it hopefully needs to run:  
-Reinstall carbs
-Replace ancient fuel with fresh, possibly clean tank
-Oil change
 

So that's what I plan to try doing.  If I can't make the carbs work, the Can-Am DS650 uses this same engine with a single carburetor, so I'll probably buy an intake from one of those to simplify the carb situation.  Here's the "Alaskafied" airbox, I'll need to get pod filters that fit in here:  

So I put on some appropriate music and got to installing the supposedly rebuilt (and rejetted for the exhaust/airbox mods... maybe) carbs:  

They're a tight squeeze but the modified airbox makes this WAY easier than it would otherwise be:  

And that's all I've done so far.  My hope is that it will fire up without filters so I can determine whether to keep these carbs or come up with an alternative... or tear the entire engine down.  Fun!

So far I haven't met a Rotax engine I don't like, so I'm feeling optimistic.

niiiice

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

Unfortunately, at the moment it looks a bit more... abstract.  A Pablo Pegaso, if you will: 

Pun of the motherberkeleying decade right there.

This is amazing stuff.

Your garage needs a sign, "Welcome to the Home of Forlorn Motorcycles"

In an attempt to drain the old fuel, I switched the petcock to reserve and got... nothing.  So I removed it:  

That doesn't look good, let's open it up:  

Wow.  That is the nastiest, most plugged up fuel anything I've ever encountered- and this is far from my first battle with stale gas.  I had to jam a screwdriver through the ports to unplug them, and used a lot of carb cleaner, but eventually got it clear:  

Still not great, and still has no filter screen, but I'm not going to order a new one unless I can confirm that the rest of the bike is close to working.  I'll run a big inline filter since I expect more nastiness.

Then I drained the fuel out of the tank, and was yet again amazed at the horror of what I found:  

There is nothing mixed in with that.  The fuel is as black as oil, and smells like some sort of chemical weapon- I'm not sure if the tank was actually disintegrating slightly and shedding particles or something, but this gives me yet another good reason to run a fuel filter before the carbs.  It looks like there are at least a few used Pegaso fuel tanks on the market if what I have isn't serviceable, but I'll try to make it work.

Hey guys, on this day in particular, what do this bike and Jesus have in common?  

Happy Easter GRM!

So, how did that happen?  First I picked up some fuel and labeled things so that I wouldn't confuse it with what came out of the tank:  

Then I changed the oil- note the Honda GN4.  If I use Honda oil it should be Honda reliable, right?  

Oil was very clean:  

Installed the tank, applied giant lawnmower fuel filter:  

And started it, as seen in the videos above.  It needed a car battery hooked up (not surprising) and a little coaxing, but it fired eventually, idles smoothly, and seems to be remarkably happy considering it has been sitting for a while and has no air filters whatsoever:  

Eventually the temperature came up, but it was not to be feared since the fan came on and cooled it back down again:  

After I shut it off, I put it on a battery tender.  I've got to figure out what vacuum lines and caps it should have since there are a lot of open ports, check over the wiring, brakes, and suspension, and put fresh tires and a new fuel petcock on it, but overall I'm very happy.  Total investment so far: $415 

The rise of Pablo!

I ordered a new fuel petcock (NOS $10 on eBay!), hopefully correct sized Uni filters, and tires since the ones on there are both worn out and won't hold air for more than a couple days.  There are some parts I'm going to have to improvise since I don't want to go hunting for little things like plastics, special clips, heat shields, etc. but I'm hoping that I can have it rideable with minimal extra investment.

I think the bike is officially called Pablo Pegaso now, I want to work up a logo involving Picasso's hilarious horse painting:  

Just doodling some...  Cut in single color vynil?

Pablo Pegaso wouldn't be a Pegaso without a horn

Not sure how Picasso would have put a horn in it though...

You have an oddly cursed mechanical life. Random oddball Italian German mongrel that's been ridden hard and pit away wet? Minimal fettling and fires right up!  Well known ford based rwd rally chassis and drivetrain? Endless berkeleyery.

Clearly you just need an old peugot or biturbo to stage rally.

In reply to paranoid_android :

Aprilia's usual logo is wonderfully simple, but some bikes got the pegasus and "the flying mythos" so it could be something like that:  

originally I was picturing an Aprilia block logo with a bunch of bullE36 M3 grafted on, like this terrible MS paint I made:

In reply to bluej :

I have been toying with the idea of importing something like a 126P or Skoda Rapid...

In all seriousness, I'm beginning to realize that a brand or vehicle's reputation has very little to do with whether I get along with it.  I do OK with "unreliable" rotary engines, rust prone Japanese cars, and oddball motorcycles (Buell, Aprilia, weird limited run Japanese bikes), but BMW, Ford, and a few others I'm sure I haven't discovered yet just don't want to work with me.  I'm not sure what specific shortcoming of mine causes the problem, but I think I should just accept it at this point and avoid the vehicles that disagree with me while seeking out even stranger stuff in the categories that I like.

This is really, really good.

Kind of a brute force attempt.  If this is the idea I can clean it up and make it more printable.

You know I like the logo with the E36 M3 grafted on it too

In reply to paranoid_android :

You know I'll run whatever you come up with, but I like where your logo is headed.

A lot of the parts for this bike are in the mail, but I can get going on some of it.  Rolled the bike into position next to the Kawasaki:  

Replaced the gigantic fuel filter with a smaller one that doesn't take up much space:  

The dual UNI filters are a tight squeeze, but they fit:  

And they clear the underside of the seat pan:  

Also swapped the front tire for a fresh TKC80:  

And with that, I'm out of parts to install for the moment.

To keep from losing my mind between the Merkur fuel injector conundrum and the relatively high stakes Kawasaki project, I decided to get stupid with the cosmetics on Pablo.  I had 4 cans of olive drab plastidip laying around from probably 2012 or 13, so I did this:  

And while those were drying, I pulled out my sticker collection and did this:  

Put a new rear tire on it (Shinko 805 with added center grooves as pioneered by KLR champion Adventure Piggy):  

Swapped the petcock for a NOS one ($10 eBay score!):  

This thing looks badass with just the tank installed:  

I don't want to pay for the decal that says what each direction on the petcock does, luckily plastidip takes sharpie pretty well: 

Pablo looks a little less aggressive with all the bodywork installed, but that's OK since it means I won't be too bent out of shape if I damage anything.  There are lots of zipties in this picture:  

Then I went for a little ride- things are great as long as you stay below half throttle, then it starts breaking up, so I think I need bigger main jets, but overall huge success!  Brakes, suspension, signals, etc. all work properly.  So I need some jets and a high beam bulb, and brake pads relatively soon.  It could certainly be a lot worse!

Looks good. I had a older klr250 that I spray bombed OD green and dyed the seat black. Made it look much better. 

In reply to rattfink81 :

The plastics on this were several different shades of silver, ranging from decent metallic to basically primer.  This is an improvement for sure.

Jets from Mikuni are expensive- however, jets for a Chinese pitbike are very cheap.  And some of them have the same dimensions.  So I ordered the finest and cheapest that Amazon had to offer and got to work.

Thanks to the flex from the zipties holding the fairings to eachother, the tank can be removed by just unbolting where they connect to it and where it connects to the bike:  

And the carbs can come out without removing the filters:  

The jets in there were crusty and old and I couldn't read the size- in all honesty, I don't care  what size they were:  

The chinesium jets are a slightly different OD but all other dimensions match.  I dug up a thread somewhere where somebody with the same Arrow exhaust put in 135 main jets and said it worked, so given that I've also got the Alaska airbox and foam filters I went with 140s.

Reinstalled parts.  Started it.  Rode it.  THIS THING RIPS

I was hoping to have posted this already, but my computer went down for a little bit.

I'm still working on getting a better resolution "Pegaso" signature for the other version

In reply to paranoid_android :

Looking excellent!

So.  I would be riding the Pegaso this weekend, but a nasty infected leg injury has me out of commission.  So I settled for some idle adjusting (super smooth, for a big single cylinder) while keeping the leg elevated:  

And installed some cheapy Amazon mirrors:  

I tried to track down whatever is keeping the highbeam from working- the bulb is still good but I think the ground prong has snapped off the connector.  Not sure what my solution for that will be.