This day turned out to be scooter repair day. The low-beam headlight had gone out a couple of days before, and I was able to replace that without a problem. Also, the exhaust was starting to get noisy. This usually means the gasket between the motor and muffler is going bad. That was a much bigger problem.
The exhaust pipe (we’ll call it) is attached to the motor with two nuts. They are important. One of them was loose, and the other was missing. The problem of the day was finding a suitable replacement nut (exact replacement was not available within 60 miles) by walking and city-busing around town. The short version is that it took all day to do what at home would be a one hour job. Hopefully I built some character in the process.
If you hit “Read More…” to see more pictures, here’s what I have. This and the featured image (above) are the only two pictures I took this day.
Mike, your Vespa has seen a lot of miles roll under its tires since you started, and it has done darn well considering what it has been through. So far, nothing catastrophic, and you have stayed attuned to its performance all along. If you had just ignored the strange sound, you and the bike could have been a lot worse off. At least now you are on the road, ready to relay your progress to the rest of us again.
That exhaust gasket is Piaggio’s version of the giraffe and the avocado in the case of the Creator: poor design. As George Burns noted when he played the Supreme One in the movie Oh God!, “neck’s too long, pit’s too big”. The Vespa’s exhaust gasket sucks.