Born to ride!

Posted In: Everyday life — September 24, 2007 @ 1:00 pm — Peter

This past weekend I worked up the courage to disassemble my Vespa and diagnose the fuel leakage that started a couple months ago. I assumed a repair involving the fuel system was best left to the professionals, but my attempts at saving for service never seemed to materialize.

I removed the storage area beneath the seat and found a great view down into the engine compartment. I followed a few suspect hoses to the leakage area and found one hose to be cracked, possibly the culprit of the fuel leak. A bit of Goggle’ing turned up a forum thread on MondernVespa.com which suggests that regularly changing the fuel line is a good idea on the ET4 model.

The repair seemed simple, so I went for it. A quick ride to Auto Zone and I had the parted I needed, a couple feet of Goodyear 3/16 fuel line and hose clamps. It took about 40 minutes to replace the line and get the clamps to tighten in the close quarters of the engine. Unfortunately I could not test the repair right away as the battery was dead and on the charger.

When I got home from the store later in the evening the battery was fully charged. I reinstalled it and took a quick cruise around the block. The repair worked, no fuel spraying from the side of the scooter!

It was pretty fun doing work on my Vespa. I plan to peruse ModernVespa.com to find some maintenance tips I could try to make the scooter run better. I’m already eying this one as my scooter does run a bit rough, apparently this can result from overfilling the gas tank, oops! Also, changing any sort of oil is probably a good thing.

I had forgotten how much I love to ride my Vespa. This morning was fantastic, albeit a bit cool. Cruising down 13th towards downtown was a blast and best of all, I made it to work in ~10 minutes. Sure does beat the ~30 it takes the bus to crawl down Colfax.

For those that have forgotten what my Vespa looks like, here is an old picture, not much has changed on it since then: