Will this Tear Down Lead to a Start Up?

As any home makeover or ride pimping TV show will tell you, the first step to any improvement is completely dismantling whatever you're improving. Since we're new to this whole thing, who are we to argue? So after James' work bench mini project (no one told me there would be carpentry), we got straight to undressing the old girl.

This is what we started with. It's hard to see here, but there are a lot of interlocking plastic sections that make up the bulk of the body work. On the whole, removing the plastics was fairly easy. However, the plastic itself seems quite brittle and there are a few existing cracks. This, combined with our general lack on knowledge about the scooter, meant we had to be extremely careful not to do any more damage. One of my biggest worries about the project is repairing cracks in the plastic. Although there are a few cracks here and there, at this point, I don't think there's anything we can't fix. More on that in a couple of weeks.


After about an hour's work, this is what we ended up with. All undressed and nowhere to go. She's definitely looking more like a scooter and less like a motorcycle now. We did our best trying to keep all of the different screws and bolts organized. Whenever possible, we taped them to the piece they were used to fasten. This became more difficult around the handle bars though. There were just so many screws holding in the switches and lights. I'm sure it's going to be a challenge getting it all back together. My guess it that it'll be a lot of trial and error.



With all the plastics off, we got our first good look at the engine. All in all, it looks pretty good. Our next mission was getting her running. We knew the engine hadn't been run for about two years so we decided to start with the basics. That included changing the spark plug, changing the oil, and installing a new battery.

We started by hitting a local scooter/jet ski/boat/motorcycle shop called Tampa Bay Power Sports. Even though they didn't have some of the parts we needed, the owner was extremely helpful. He was able to give us plenty of helpful advice and even showed us the proper way to fill the battery we bought with acid. I believe his exact words were, "I'd better do that for you. You two will end up with battery acid everywhere." Being that this was absolutely true, we took no offense. We'll definitely give them any business we can in the future. We ended up getting the oil (10W40 fully synthetic) and the spark plug from Advanced Auto Parts and heading back to the garage for installation.

So did she start? In a word, "Almost." Fortunately, before we completely flooded it, it actually turned over a couple of times and tried to run. Being the newbs we clearly are at this, we couldn't figure out which direction on the fuel cut-off was actually on. We needed to know for sure how the fuel cutoff switch worked so the only thing left was to take it off and find out. Now that we have it off, we might as well take the carb off and give it a good cleaning. More on that in my next post!

Thanks for reading!
-Jason