I often forget that I even have this machine; that is until I need to lift its 60lb steel framed ass out of the back of our truck so that I can use the truck for truck things. My Solex is actually my oldest mode of transportation; oldest and longest owned. I have had it for 13 years now, and never written about it. The story about how it came to be mine is almost as interesting as the bike itself.

The bike discarded in 1997 at the St. Michael dump about 12km from where I grew up in Lamont. The bike was found by a man named Karl; he lived in Bruderheim and happened upon the sad looking yellow bike when taking a load of his own spring cleaning to the dump. Karl thought it looked interesting and decided to bring it back home with him to tinker with and for his daughter to ride. About a year later he decided to offer it up to Bruderheim church’s annual youth fundraiser yard sale. Bruderheim church is the church that I grew up attending with my family so you might think that I snapped it up at this point; nope the bike wouldn’t become mine for another 6 years. The pastor’s son purchased the bike for a tidy $10. He employed it to run his paper route, using a bungie cord to hold a bundle of papers on the back. I remember him showing me the bike in the church parking lot and letting me ride around a bit. It had practically no brakes; it was slow and smoked a bit. I thought it was awesome! In 2004 the pastor and his family announced that they would be moving to North Carolina, and as such they were going to have a bit of a garage sale to get rid of unneeded items. I had forgotten about the little Solex, and also didn’t go to the garage sale; lucky for me it didn’t get sold. Sometime in the summer I was working repairing roads in Lamont County, the thought of the weird front wheel drive Solex popped into my head, as tarring roads left me with a lot of thinking time. I called the pastor’s son as soon as I got home and 20 minutes later I was standing next to it in their garage. I asked him how much he wanted for it, he said “nothing, you can have it.” The Solex had been sitting unused for the last few years with old mixed gas still in the tank. We aired up the tires, and after a bit of peddling the French 50cc fired to life. I then rode the bike 11km down the highway shoulder home.

The Solex was in a sad state. Very dirty, no brakes, throttle stuck wide open, incorrect tires. My idea was to cut it and make it into some sort of chopper/bobber bike. That was the plan until I started searching the web (possibly using Netscape Navigator) to learn more about the machine. What I found out was that this Solex 5000 was probably 1 of around 300 originally sold in Canada and 1 of around 50 sold in Alberta. Being that they were never a register-able vehicle facts are a little hard to track, by my best guess this Solex 5000 was probably about 1 of 5 that still existed in Alberta in 2004. I presently know of two others. Needless to say I wasn’t about to cut up this rare chunk of steel and bastardise it into a chopper. Now what? Restore it I guess.

I ordered a set of original saddle bags for it on ebay, and also a new set of handle bars complete with headlight and bell. All together that set me back around $150. I also grabbed a can of John Deere yellow spray paint which was a nearly identical match to touch up some of the more tatty parts. Everything else was treated to a lot of hand polishing. I made a new mud flap by tracing the old one out on a rubber floor mat in my dad’s garage. I bought a set of yellow walled BMX tires that were a better match for the bike. A set of original tires would have cost around $200, the line had to be drawn somewhere. The smoking issue was remedied by cleaning the carb and fuel tank. We then found the proper mixture was 40:1 and not the 32:1 that had been used for the last few years. I should also mention that my Dad helped out every step of the way.

With the Solex sharpened up it became my daily ride to and from work. It got a lot of looks everywhere it went. The guys I had gone to school with would yell homophobic slurs at me as I rode by, they were so jealous. At full tilt with my body hunched down I could hit 38km/h with my cheeks flapping in the wind, I could scrape the pedals on the asphalt throwing it into turns.

The Solex is a strange machine, looking like a small bicycle with a motor attached to the top of the front wheel. There are a couple of noteworthy disadvantages to making a moped FWD. The bike has a major weight bias to the front, the steering is heavy, and the motors ability to pull the bike up a hill is, umm limited. The advantage is if the rider starts pedalling while the motor is engaged, BOOM, all-wheel drive mode unlocked!

The startup procedure for the Solex is simple, turn the choke, lower the motor onto the front wheel, hold the decompression valve open and peddle the bike forward for a few seconds, release the decompression valve and keep peddling until the engine fires, hang on when the HPs kick in! Coming to a stop I like to raise the motor off the wheel and kill it using the decompression valve, then stop using levers the same as a normal bicycle. The bike itself is capable of amazing fuel economy, estimates I have read online claim 100+mpg.

I rode the Solex to my office job in the city once last year. It took me almost an hour to cover the 17km distance. I blew the front tire when I was about 2km from work and had to push the bike the rest of the way. The reason the front tire blew was because I had mistakenly aired it up to 60psi instead of 40, since the motor literally drives the top of the front tire it tends to heat up a bit, the heat caused it to expand and a minor bump cause a big boom! At lunch a friend of mine drove me to the Canadian Tire to grab a new tire and tube. I fixed it and rode home. Unfortunately I decided to plan my route home instead of letting Google decide for me. Unbeknown to me, my planned route included three staircases in the river valley. It was on these stairs that I learned that the Solex was too wide to ride down the planks on the sides of the stairs that are put there for bicycles. When it can’t be ridden the Solex just becomes a very heavy bike, and while carrying 60lbs up and down three sets of river valley stairs was probably better than going to the gym, doing it while wearing jeans kind of sucked.

This year I plan to use the bike a bit more, ride it to work a few times, race small children, take it to a bike cruise night; you know cool biker stuff. I will try to do a video review of the Solex as soon as I can rescue it from where it currently is, which involves fixing a leaky Chevy.

As a side story to this in 2009 Karl, who originally found the bike, became my brother’s father in law; small world eh?