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The Mini Bike Song

Joined
Sep 27, 2007
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Northern Fayette County
What a trip! Everything about the song fits me to a Tee. Almost eerie.:wary: Sho-nuff, I was 8yrs old, 1974. 2.5HP Briggs. I think I paid 10 bucks for it. Needed a chain, clutch and throttle cable. My dad took it to the local lawnmower shop called Hilton Rentals to get parts. They had to order everything. Took like 6 weeks for the parts to come in!!:headbang: Longest 6 weeks in my life!!! It had an air vane type governor that was driven off the flywheel fan. My grand dad took a pair of tin snips and cut it off. That thing would fly!!:eek2: I took care of blowin' the engine.:lol2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbTfBkNg-No
 
I got bored with the song after about 90 seconds, but the mini-bike-at-eight-years-old theme seems to be a dynamic shared universally by all of us who are life-long riders.

Little Timmy Kreitz at eight years old on his very first motorcycle, summer of 1978:

PICT0054.jpg


By sheer luck and the grace of God over the years, I still have the frame. It *will* run again some day:

timsoldminibike.jpg
 
Tim, I'm impressed!!! How on earth did you manage to hold on to that frame for so many years? I have zero memory of what ever happened to my 1st 2 mini's. I threw the rod on the 1st one in downtown Winedale,Tx of all places. 2nd one I broke the frame clean off at the headset. Luckily I was wearing my mothers helmet at the time since as it's been said it was a spectacular endo.:lol2::flip: Both of those just disappeared.:shrug: Pretty sure Dad hauled 'em off to the dump.:miffed:
Now the 3rd one I held onto well into Jr. High. Found the mini complete but of course the engine didn't run. The guy down the road was selling an old tiller with a 5HP Tecumseh for $10 so I installed the engine and junked the tiller. I didn't know any better and assumed 5HP would be twice as fast as a 2.5.:trust: I learned the hard way that they all run at basically the same RPM's.:pound: To add insult to injury it had an internal flyweight type governor so I couldn't pull the ole tin snip trick. It would get it off the line though.:thumb:
I was about 11 then when along came the MIGHTY XR75!!:zen: Funny, I sold #3 mini to my metal shop teacher for 40 bucks!!:lol2:
 
Tim, I'm impressed!!! How on earth did you manage to hold on to that frame for so many years?

It really did have as much to do with luck as anything else. Prepare for a long story.

:sun:

That little motorcycle was purchased used in May of 1978 at a place called Grandpa's Hardware in Clarksville, Tennessee. I was spending that summer with my biological father (whom I have not seen since 1984, but that's another story). He was in the 101st Airborne, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and was renting a foreman's house on an old farm somewhere off-post. I guess he figured I might get bored being so far away from home, so he bought me that bike for some excitement and I proceeded to ride the **** out of it the entire summer, eventually messing up the engine.

Then, somehow or another (and I'm still not sure exactly how), the bike ended up at my grandparent's house in San Angelo a few months later, where it sat until the following summer. Me and my Pap got it running again and I rode it around his land a whole bunch. But my mom didn't like motorcycles, so I didn't get to immediately bring it home to Midland.

By the summer of 1981, my biological father was out of the army and had moved back to San Angelo (his and my mom's hometown, and not coincidentally where I was born) where he landed a job with GTE at Mathis Field, working on their Lear jets. That summer, we overhauled the bike completely, installing a new B&S 1.5-horse and painting the frame blue. I rode it all of summer 1981 and 1982, then finally talked my mom and adoptive father into letting me bring it home. From there, I basically rode that minibike every day until I was 14, when I finally got too big for it and moved on to dirt bikes and three-wheelers.

It then sat in a junk heap out on the back of my parent's land from 1985 until 1996, when I rediscovered it half-buried out there in the dirt with a bush growing through it. I had been certain to that point that it had been long-since sold for scrap, but somehow it had managed to survive. Amused and elated, I dug it out of the West Texas sand and took it home.

The tires, seat, and engine were all useless, so I threw away everything but the frame and stored it. As soon as I get my Mach I restoration finished, the little mini-bike will be next. It just seems wrong not to bring it back to life after it survived so much and brought me so many great times. I suppose it'll be another thread for the Project Bikes section.

:thumb:
 
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Great story, Tim. I'm sure it will be a labor of love.

I never got to have one. Mom was adamant about that. But a friend had one, and I'd go ride it sometimes at his place. Until we moved . . .:tears:
 
But a friend had one, and I'd go ride it sometimes at his place. Until we moved . . .:tears:

I think they finally decided to let me bring it home because all of my friends had them, and keeping me off all the other kids' bikes was an impossible task.

By the way, this thread reminds me that one of my buddies had an *Indian* dirt bike. No one believes me when I tell this, but I swear, it had a huge Indian logo on the tank and was a 2-stroke with knobby tires. I'd guess that it was about 80cc or so.
 
What a story Tim! That's one restoration project thread I can't wait to start reading....

.
 
Little Timmy Kreitz at eight years old on his very first motorcycle, summer of 1978:

PICT0054.jpg
Love the foam rubber and electrical tape!!:clap::clap::lol2:

Here's a couple pics of a mini by brother fixed up about 12 yrs ago for his newborn son. No joke, a week after he was born he was fixing this thing up!!:rofl:
MiniBike2.jpg


MiniBike1.jpg


Sorry they're so small but these are the only pics I have of it. It was immaculate when he was done!:clap:

Same kid 12yrs later...:lol2: I guess things just ....:shrug:change.
Me and Cameron at CrossCreek.
DSC00321Medium.jpg


He laughs when he sees those mini pics.:haha: He's like ":brainsnapyou gotta be kidding!!:lol2:".
DSC00335Medium.jpg


Back in the '70's my mom was quite the photographer but all her photos are slides. Seems that was the fad back then. I know without a doubt she has pics of me on one of my mini's, I just have to find 'em.
 
I remember seeing one of those Indian dirt bikes once. Can't remember where or when, though.

Rman, your mother probably took slides because you get the picture you take, not what some photoprinter thinks it should look like. Plus, slides were less expensive than prints.
 
Rman, your mother probably took slides because you get the picture you take, not what some photoprinter thinks it should look like. Plus, slides were less expensive than prints.
Nothing against slides, she took beautiful photos with a huge Konica camera back in the '70s and '80s. I tried to go through her slides( close to 1000) a couple yrs ago but the slide projector broke and I'm yet to fix it. My uncle suggested simply projecting the slides on a small screen and snapping the images with a digital camera.
 
Nothing against slides, she took beautiful photos with a huge Konica camera back in the '70s and '80s. I tried to go through her slides( close to 1000) a couple yrs ago but the slide projector broke and I'm yet to fix it. My uncle suggested simply projecting the slides on a small screen and snapping the images with a digital camera.

You can do that, and there are companies who will do it for a fee.

I have some slides that are so beautiful they'll take your breath away, but they're not as good in prints. It's largely because of the light projecting through the colors. But I'm in the same boat. Not only do I have lots of slides I need to re-capture, but tons and tons of prints. My wife wanted a scanner almost three years ago to do this, but we haven't yet unboxed the scanner . . . sigh.
 
When I was a kid, if it did not cut grass, it could not have a motor :doh: I desperately wanted either a mini bike or a go cart. Never happened. Pops had a CB450 back in the early 70's for a short time and that was my first taste of riding. He even took me on some rugged backroads into Fort Hood on it, my first tast of dual sport riding :trust: The itch never went away, but it took until I was 33 before I was finally able to get a bike. Unfortunately, I did not have many friends with bikes when I was a kid. The one that did was a putz that would ride back and forth in front of our house all the time to show off his bikes, but he would NEVER allow anyone to ride them. I soooo wanted to throw some nail strips out in the road, hehe...
 
Unfortunately, I did not have many friends with bikes when I was a kid. The one that did was a putz that would ride back and forth in front of our house all the time to show off his bikes, but he would NEVER allow anyone to ride them. I soooo wanted to throw some nail strips out in the road, hehe...

Haahaha! :mrgreen:

I was lucky in that three of my friends had dirt bikes and minibikes. Every time my parents turned around, I was riding up and down the country roads in the rural area where we lived on some other kid's bike. They finally gave up and let me ride my own.

I think it was interesting for my dad, because I hadn't taken a big interest in working on things mechanically to that point. But once I got that minibike home, I wanted to take care of it and understand how it worked. That was a big change in me; one that has stuck with me all these years.
 
Hooligan. :lol2:

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIwMHLGLRcQ"]doodlebug mini bike , 53 tooth rear sprocket , vare nicea ! - YouTube[/ame]
 
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I think they finally decided to let me bring it home because all of my friends had them, and keeping me off all the other kids' bikes was an impossible task.

By the way, this thread reminds me that one of my buddies had an *Indian* dirt bike. No one believes me when I tell this, but I swear, it had a huge Indian logo on the tank and was a 2-stroke with knobby tires. I'd guess that it was about 80cc or so.

Indian Mini Mini I had the 50cc one as well :rider: it was in between my QA50 and SL70 If I recall when we passed it to my little brother it got seized and discarded
 
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