>>2082945it's fun, bro
also unlike normal cycling, these engines come in one of maybe three main models being churned out by bootleggers in chyna (originally being clones of legitimate scooter/light motorbike engines) so parts commonality is very high. their operation is fundamentally very simple so they're easy to modify and diagnose. the physics that make it work are just intuitive enough that you can do benchtop experimentation and easily diagnose the most common failures, but not so wacky that you need precision machining or a graduate degree just to confirm or deny common fuddlore.
it's also plainly obvious that they will never be particularly fast, and pedalling them is a chore, so there tends to be not very much actual competition other than "my bike looks more SICC than your's" and even then that is subjective and half of the fun of these things is slapping it together yourself and making it have some amount of personality despite the core of it, the engine, being the same model (or at least same design, even if made by a different taiwanese child) 99% of the time
