Monday, August 22, 2011

almost...

A few weeks back Nichols helped me with the vespino. This thing has been such a pain in the ass...we worked it down to a possible problem with the decomp. The design of this bike is annoying at times (most times) because just to check the head you have to take so much of the bike apart...the engine is tucked up in there. So we used we used a car lift to hold the front of the bike up.
Unnecessary, yes...makes the job easier...yes. When we took the head off to inspect it, here's what we found...
Brand new metrakit head with a chunk missing from the decomp area. There's no way that the decomp will seal properly with that. We tapped the decomp hole and threaded in a bolt with JB weld to seal it up. I took it down the street and instantly it started right up. Unfortunately it had very little gas and I forgot the tank key at my garage...woof. A day or so later I got it doing wheelies UPHILL down my alley. Excitedly I rode it to moped Wednesday...it was running fine until about 3 blocks from the Monkey Wrench; it just slowly died. Soft seize? Nope. Compression still good? Yep. Turns out it was the bike lever cable that I installed. The cable came loose from the housing. Yesterday I replaced the cable housing and still no dice...vespino time out...again...