New member in Michigan

#1
Hello!

I've been lurking on the site for a bit and felt an urge to whip up a quick intro (it's almost like the site kept telling me to do so, lol). I know that us forum dwellers like pics, so I've whipped up a few:

At any rate, I hail from Taylor, MI and have actually owned a minibike for quite a long time, but have never ridden it. Back when I used to repair lawn mowers, one of my uncles found three minibike frames & handed two of them to me & a third to his brother. Being that I lived at home, I wound up giving away one of the two frames to a lucky neighbor kid. The other seemed way too cool to get rid of, so I held on to it. It was pretty complete (aside from the engine), though beat up badly.

It has kicked around since 2000 and one of my younger brothers wanted to work on it this year. So, here is what I kept all this time (sadly, after I had disassembled it a bit):





And a view of some chrome/natural finish items (after stripping most of the paint from several parts):


Even the seat had fared poorly - it had new vinyl stapled on at some point, but the wood base was rotten:


My brother and I have spent a fair amount of time stripping the paint off the thing & it finally came time to paint:


And the most recent pic is of it, loosely assembled with the (surprisingly intact) original seat foam:


I'm adapting a Briggs engine to work & decided to modify the shroud a bit, to make it look a bit more vintage:


That's where it sits now. I am hoping to get it together in the next month or so, though I have gotten distracted a bit by something else...the minibike which was given to my other uncle wound up being given to me as well.



That's all I've got for now- this is a great community & I look forward to getting these both back together!

-Rob
 
#2
Welcome to the site!!...........Looks like your red mini is a Rupp from the late 60's..........The other is a Ruttman washer which would make it pre 68.................Nice scores!......................Tom.
 
#5
Welcome aboard Rob ! :thumbsup: Looks like you have a couple of great bikes to start with. Good Luck, and have fun with them.
 
#8
Thanks for the welcome! Based on what I've seen here, I believe the red one is a 69 Rupp Roadster & I had just found out about the Ruttman washer. Actually had figured that these were 70's or early 80's, but I'm pretty happy that they turned out to be 60's machines.

Looking forward to some more progress soon - I'll be having most of the old chrome parts powder coated (most of the chrome is quite poor) & the repro seat cover arrived today. I'll put together a proper resto thread later on.

-Rob
 
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