Modern Vespa

Good lord… I thought it was some kind of Chia pet!

Probably cleaner...

Yup. I fix stuff just for the challenge of figuring it out. Usually, the parts are so cheap compared to replacement (good luck getting someone else to repair things!) that it's worth the risk even if I can't do it. The fact that it's cheaper and keeps stuff out of the landfill are just added satisfaction/motivation.

Wife: Did you ever get a new hand sander?
Me: No

Wife: why not?
Me: cause I fixed the old one

Wife: Oh

This should entitle you to some Scooter Purchase Credits

Very true, since I have a 3D printer I repair way more things, very satisfying.

That's a lot of work but I know the feeling. My washer started squealing and it was a minimum of $500 for peeps to come out to tinker. Ended up being the main bearing getting the business from a bad seal. I think it cost me a total of $55 to fix it myself. Worth the effort.

That's got to be the most fudge I've seen on an engine. Nice job.

Holy smokes, that was a shaggy little booger.

Cabled and wired in the ET3 engine… For the third, … err fourth, fifth time? Still need to adjust the selectors and clutch. Inching towards ham.

This will be the most savory ham ever. I hope the ET has finally run out of piss & vinegar and fallen in line!

Guess I'm racking them up lately. Another task finished on the list. Malaguti loves the fuel when I'm wooding it. Gas can doesn't fit on the narrow floorboard. This time it's recycled aluminum from computer cabinets a friend gave me. Haven't glued aluminum together with the tig machine in awhile. I managed not to turn the whole thing into molten lava. Next will be painting and proper hardware. The tiedown lugs are from a Beechcraft Bonanza, also recycled. Hope it holds up.

I dig it!

Silly Idea: set it up with a pneumatic ram to flip it up like a speed brake when the brakes are applied. Add a load sensing switch to disable that function when something's sitting on it. Paint the center to match the scoot

Bonus Points: add a cruise control rangefinder up front. When you get in the draft, have it trigger a servo and adjust a DRS flap.

Looks like a dive brake off an SBD Dauntless! Could double as a cheese grater in a pinch. 😆

Strange, but I know exactly what you are referring to. The video game IL2 Sturmovik turned me into an aviation geek.

Throw some coals and gas under that rack and grill a rack o ribs! I like this rack, well done

Pure genius on the grill! I'd have to leave the finish raw or make a stainless one. 🤔🤤

You would be Ace of the rally if you rolled up with a grill-rack! Sign me up for the Rally Ribs roasting on a Rally rack!

"I like my racks like I like my steak, well done."

Today was amazing riding weather, so I decided to take the GL for its first extended trip, riding up to my clubmate's house in Kentucky for lunch and some hang time, and home.

Bike was running great. Nice, steady, cool temps (255 on plug CHT, 1050F on the eGT) at 50-55 MPH generally uphill. Smooth and plenty of power still on tap if I wanted it. Exactly what you aim for from a touring motor.

I got about fifteen miles from my house, though, solidly into the Middle of Nowhere, when it suddenly backfired twice and died. Electrics also went out.

Clutch in, coast to the side of the road, thinking, "WTF? No way I just seized," but at the same time, "Backfires means ignition." I take a minute to compose myself, then kicked it over and compression seemed just fine, but sure enough, no spark, no electrics, and the battery fuse had blown.

I'm guessing that wires must have rubbed through between the ignition and the AC. Not something I brought tools for, but no big deal other than getting it home.

Nobody with a truck is available and I didn't want to ruin my buddy's afternoon, so I push the bike a couple miles back to the nearest intersection where I can safely leave it while I get an uber to my house to come back and get it.

About that time, I remember that I could call my daughter (wife is out of town at a conference), so she comes to grab me, we throw it in the back of her Subaru and from there take it to the house.

After we grab some lunch, I pulled the flywheel, expecting to see a couple rubbed wires, but no...the WHOLE DAMN STATOR PLATE HAD SHEARED OFF!!!

So I'll be ordering a new plate and (probably) coil, but I can only be so upset. This was one of the very first Vape kits ever made. I've had it for close to ten years, and it's seen a lot of hours of runtime. But I still didn't have "catastrophic metal fatigue" anywhere near the list of potential failure scenarios when I was thinking of possible root causes as I pushed it down the highway.

Anyways...how was everyone else's day?

Interesting! Anything jammed between the stator and the flywheel? Something grabbed and broke the plate?

Hopefully just a plate replacement and a re-wire.

Wow, my you find interesting ways to break stuff!
It won't be long before the mighty GL is on the road again!

That's quite a unique situation. Makes me think something got lodged somehow. Glad you're ok. Love seeing it snug in the Subaru! Ad that to the list of scoot transports. What a nice daughter you have!

WOW - crazy failure! But what an adventurous day

No evidence or I could see that something was jammed in there--it still kicked over seemingly normally when I was on the side of the road, and the wires were not pulled apart. I was doing about 55 when it happened, steady throttle, smooth road, and had been at it for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Nothing rough sounding, no weird ignition or electrical gremlins until the backfires and death.

I think it just plain wore out. What's really surprising is that I just rebuilt this motor a few months ago and didn't notice the stator plate having any cracks or other oddities at the time.

I'll take a closer look and see what I can see, but all three mounting posts seem to have sheared off.

The other day we were talking about crank balancing. And what can happen. This definitely falls into the category of a weird thing that broke.
Good work getting it into the car.

The sh!t hit the fan, you stayed cool, didn't lose any skin to the asphalt in the process, then figured it out quick - all and all, not too bad. * Tips hat to C-man*

I figured it out. Combination of bad luck and lack of attention to detail.

Two of the stator plate screws were stock LML screws with washers. The third was about 2mm shorter, and for some reason I installed it with no washer (hurrying/lack of attention to detail).

The shorter, washerless screw had vibrated and worn away the face of the stator underneath itself. The other two screws had their washers, but weren't quite tight against the plate, even though they were bottomed out in their mounting holes, so they felt tight, but the plate still had a fraction of a millimeter of room to vibrate.

When I rotated the plate so the washerless screw was not over the worn spot, it felt solid, but once rotated back where it had actually been installed, I could feel play in the plate.

And that fraction of a millimeter was obviously enough to allow vibration and cause the accelerated metal fatigue.

May have to reset that explosion clock. Wasn't a combustion explosion but you sure did explode that stator plate!

If it was a bed, I would've had to feed quarters into it to get that much vibration.

I'm glad you found what cause the problem. And respect that you fessed up to your installation oversight. I remember years ago that when the Vespatronic ignitions first came out that there was a few instances where the backing plate had broken. The later versions came with a stronger design. I was thinking that every other brand of aftermarket ignition would have also made their stator plates to be strong…and apparently they did. It's pretty amazing how vibrations can quickly loosen very tight fasteners. I also learned this riding dirtbikes…
I could ride all year in the wet, slick, muddy, rocky slow going single track trail here in the pacific Northwest, and never have any fasteners loosen up on my KTM. But after 6 hours of higher speeds in the mohave desert will loosen up anything that doesn't have a heavy coat of blue thread lock.

Looks like you had the old type plate with the separate 3 pegs to hold the stator. They redesigned them cause they had issues, probably like yours…

This is the new type, reinforced as they describe it…

I like to think of myself as an Innovator in the field of Killing Scooters.

While I don't like making mistakes, I still enjoy the opportunity to dig in and get down to the root cause of the fault, which is often multiple steps removed from the actual incident.

Tuning these motors takes them so far outside the original design parameters at this point that almost everything we do is (or needs) some sort of mitigation for a risk that the original designers hadn't even considered. Even seemingly-trivial things can blow us up (literally).

In this case, it was the stator plate mounting screw holes being less than 1mm too shallow for my LML screws. If I think about it next time I'm in the workshop, I'll measure the gap with feeler gauges just to know for sure.

So based on this knowledge, I can consider my stator installation technique, which goes something like this:

1) hold the plate in place, ensuring it's aligned so the slots are over the correct screws
2) start the screws, making sure each one is seated, plus a couple more turns
3) fit the plate into the mounting points, then tighten each screw down until it's almost (but not quite) tight.
4) adjust the plate to where I think it should be for initial timing
5) holding the plate, tighten the screws, starting with the top-most one

And at #5 was where bad luck and not paying attention got me. The top-most screw was the only one that actually tightened down correctly. BUT, once it was tight, it pressed the plate down (combined with the tight fit of the plate into its mounting seats, so I didn't realize that the other two screws were bottoming out instead of seating properly against the plate. When I tested the plate, it *seemed* properly tight.

Lesson (expensively) learned. Yeah, I really learned learned the religion of "safety wire everything you can" with the Lammy, but threadlocker also has a solid role to play on these bikes. Yup. This was one of the very first Vapes that SIP had made. Until you mentioned it, I hadn't even considered or noticed that the stator plate had been re-engineered.

I'll measure the thickness for comparison once I have a replacement on hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if the base plate isn't thicker, too.

All-in-all, a fairly crappy-but-educational kind of day. At least the weather was nice for it.

Hmmm... Friday may be right.... We need to convene the Explosion Clock Council.

And as I was mere *months* away from an explosion-free year, despite spending half of it focused on a Lambretta, of all things!

Also: LMFAO!

Hmmm.. I don't think so. This wasn't an explosion per se, more of a letting go which shut down the motor. Nothing like a seized or holed piston, rod going thru the case....In other words, not exciting enough to call it an explosion.

It was pretty exciting when it happened at 55 MPH.

And like I said, I'm an Innovator and those things have all been done before.

I guess it could have been worse. It is in the nature of vehicles from this era to shake themselves into their natural disassembled state. My bus is the same way. Something comes loose and starts off a catastrophic chain of events. One that comes to mind is the small bolt on the clamp on the ignition coil coming loose and dumping the coil and ignition wires into the fan.Thankfully no accompanying fuel leak.

The solution is to ride/drive on a regular basis and lovingly wipe down all the stop and go parts while checking for tightness. I don't always do it though.

As soon as I read this, my eyes went to the explosion clock.