Vespatude - A Vespa Blog: Got fuel, now what?

This morning I am trying to get this post up before I lose power. We are having that "wintery mix" that we get here. It coats the trees and everything with sheets of ice. Already my UPS has kicked in three or four times. Boy! Am I ever glad I got DSL and left cable. The cable is down... The DSL is up.

Anyway, I got my fuel tap and fuel tap wrench yesterday. You can see the new fuel tap beside the old one in the picture below. You can see the breather tube and filter are missing from the old one.

Getting the tap out was a breeze, but when I went to put the new one in I could not get the wrench to fit around the nut because the filter was in the way. I wrestled and wrestled with it. Finally, I took some of the bend out the the wrench shaft and viola! I had it done in no time.

The above picture shows what happens when you don't have a filter. The little arrow is pointing to some kludge that found its way into the tap bowl. What you can't see is that some of that stuff was also in the little ports you see there. Now it is clean and we have free flowing fuel.

This is the craziest thing I have done when working on my scooter. Earlier when trying to get this rubber connected from the frame to the carb, I nearly lost my sanctification! The rubber was sort of rigid and just did not want to stretch around the connection areas. Mike told me to boil it. Boil it? Yep. Boiling the rubber made it more pliable and while it was still no fun, it certainly was easier to get it connected.

So, what happened? Same things. Here is the process:

1. Pull out choke and hold it open
2. Kick start
3. Engine starts on first kick nearly every time
4. Let it idle with choke open
5. Push choke in
6. Engine idles for maybe five seconds with no change
7. RPMs begin to increase and then engine dies

Note: if you increase the throttle at any point in the above sequence, the engine dies with a sputter. You've got to think it is fuel flow or carb related.

I don't think I am going to get this thing running before I leave for Christmas. Oh, well, I can make getting it to run my New Year's resolution.