Have you ever thought to yourself “the BMW C1 was a terrible idea, I could totally make a better scooter/car hybrid!” If so, then you might be YouTuber Meanwhile in the Garage. According to him, he first came up with the idea of an enclosed scooter while he was a student. He saw some other poor rider get all muddy, wet, and miserable on a rainy day.
Time passed, and now he’s an adult with years of metalworking skills under his belt, as well as ample access to equipment and supplies to not only start this fairly big project, but also finish it, as well. All it turned out he would need was a donor scooter to turn into his futuristic vision. What would it be?
MITG ended up taking a tiny little Kymco Agility 125 and hacking it to pieces to serve as the base for this project. Now, at first, we couldn’t blame you for being a little apprehensive watching him just tear into that frame with a hacksaw. Snip, snip, snip go all the wires in the wiring loom, too, but it’s not quite as scary as it may seem at first. From the way he’s clearly labeling all those wires so he knows what matches up with what, you get a firm sense that this isn’t his first time doing any of this. Well, maybe it’s his first time putting this specific vehicle together, but definitely not tackling all the little steps that he takes to complete it.
Like Magic:
From seeing the very beginning of this video, we know that he does successfully get the project together. Once you see that it’s a little 125, though, another question immediately arises: Does he swap or modify that engine in any way? I mean, clearly the finished vehicle has to weigh a whole lot more than the original plastic bodywork that came from the Kymco factory.
It’s a video that’s almost an hour and 12 minutes long, but the way it’s shot and edited is so entertaining, it doesn’t feel like it’s as long as it is. Time is funny that way, and MITG seems to bend it just as skillfully as he does those pieces of metal he uses to make the frame for this bike.
I also found it heartening to see that even though he’s clearly someone who has some formidable expertise, he still makes mistakes. Not only that, but he isn’t afraid to calmly show them, then fix them, and show the whole thing as part of his video, too. It’s not the end of the world. Just sit back, learn from what you did wrong, and make it better. Garage skills that apply to the rest of your life, too, amirite?
Anyway, we DO see that he plugs that little 125cc engine back into his newly-constructed frame at the end. Maybe MITG and our other fabricating fave Allen Millyard will team up on a project one day. We should be so lucky!
One more thing: This entire video is a PSA for always checking that you’ve tightened up all your nuts and bolts after you do any work on your bike. Not all of us have our friends rolling alongside and behind us with cameras, who can also dive out and help us when we tip over because we forgot to tighten something.