On the Bench 1

This slightly sorry looking machine is a 1970 MZ ETS 250 Trophy Sport. It's a pretty rare bike, only about 16,000 of them were ever produced, compared to hundreds of thousands of most of the other MZ models and of that total I believe only about 600 came to the UK. The bike has not been used for about 18 months now as the headset bearings failed and a fork seal started to leak. At the same time I decided to uprate the electrics. I wish I had thought of this blog a little sooner as I have recently changed the faulty bearings and seals and it is quite an involved and interesting task, but I am not taking it all apart again just to take photos!

The bike is well on the way to completion now, I am looking forward to riding it again.

This is a VAPE ignition kit system from Power-Dynamo.biz in Berlin. They are not cheap, but are well worth the purchase price if you can be fairly sure of keeping the bike for quite a time as they give 12 volt electrics which are a considerable improvement on the standard and now very old 6 volt system and sparks are provided by a maintenance free flywheel magneto, as pictured above.

I must at this point acknowledge the invaluable and very kind assistance offered to me by my good friend Nigel who is a wizard with electrics, whereas I am most certainly not. It is he who has installed the kit on the bike for me and hopefully tomorrow night we will get the bike in one piece and see if it will run. There is a strange electrical fault at the moment which I do not understand, but I suspect Nigel will sort it out quite quickly.

More news soon I hope!