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Saturday, June 03, 2006
The Vespa is on the road again
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As I have struggled with getting my scooter up and going again, I have to stop and be thankful that it isn't as bad as it could be! I could be starting with what I saw on eBay the other day.
The scooter is in need of a lot of love! I can't tell if that is rust or a reddish paint. I went back to eBay to see if it sold (it was at $100 when I first saw it) but I couldn't find it anywhere. It must have gotten picked up by some lucky soul!
Here is the good news on my end. I have had some time to put into the bike over the last week -- couple minutes here and another couple minutes there. Heebie is back up and running! In some aspects, it seems to be running better than before.
One of the things that I found seemed to be causing issues is that the bearing surrounding the flywheel shaft has been added - I really believe it is a P series bearing set put in the VBB engine case. Anyway, it is not flush with the case. It makes a little knob. This means that the stator does not fit flush against the guides. If you tighten it too much on one side, it will raise on the other. At first I thought this was because the stator was warped. However, when I got a new stator and had the same issue, I figured that couldn't be the case.
Not only that, but the Indonesian guys had put in a combination of screws to hold the stator in place. While make adjustments the threads got stripped. I worked around this for a little while by using tap screws. Well, you can imagine that after unscrewing and screwing those things a couple of times you have shot the threads. I went to Home Depot and got a quarter inch thread repair kit and in about 10 minutes I had new threads and good screws sliding right in there.
This allowed me more control getting the stator secured. Because of the weird base, I did not force the stator down on one side or the other, but worked to make the stator even. Now the timing seems much better. The engine gives me a different sound than before.
I hope to get the thing back out on the road today and I'll report how it goes at the end of the day.
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