Modern Vespa

Was shorter than I had thought.

In all seriousness this was an easier DIY than I had expected and wont hesitate to do it again.it can be a bit messy if you ride your belt to failure like I did, but overall I had it done in under 2 hours (caveat, I have an air powered impact wrench for disassembly, though I think o could do it with a breaker bar nearly as easily.)

I see lots of people make special tools for holding the variation to torque it.. I used a block of wood and it seemed to do the trick.

Now, what is the maintenance interval on one of these belts. "Forget about it" is not the right strategy.. I think I had around 15k miles on this one.

Owners manual for the GTS says 15,000km rather than 15,000 miles...

If you're wedging the wood block against one of the variator fins you risk having the fin break off. Much safer to make or buy a proper holding tool if you plan on doing a few of these yourself.

Every 9000 miles. I change the rollers and little "U" shaped slidey things every time I'm in there as well.

If you do a lot of highway, I'd cut that to 7500 - 8000 miles.

Belts can and do break near the end of their lives and then your SOL.

Service Intervals

There's a downloadable pfd version near the end of this thread: Maintenence Schedule for GTS

I second the vote for getting a proper variator tool. Those fins are brittle. Holding by only one will eventually break it. Then you will end up buying a new fan plate and the proper tool. Just skip the middle step and buy the proper tool.

For me, the most informative part of this post was seeing a method that would work to put the variator on if you were broken down and didn't have the proper tool. I think you could probably use a piece of wood to lock it in place and break the nut loose too. I know with the leader bike and 50, you can use a large phillips screwdriver to lock the variator, but never thought about how to do it on a bike that doesn't have teeth around the variator plate.
I am surprised someone with an air impact didn't use it to put the variator back on too. That's what most shops use.
Without knowing everything that was done or replaced between the two photos, I'm curious as to how long this belt will last.

I appreciate all of the concerns for safety and the risk of breaking a varistor fin.

For whatever it's worth I worked hard to have to wood up against 2 fins to spread the load. To Motovista's point, it's definitely a road-side improvisation to keep in the back of your mind.

I chose not to impact wrench the bold back on because I did have a torque wrench and wasn't sure that I wouldn't put way too much torque on and break something worse. Breaking a fin off the varistor pulley would be a bummer, but I can imagine plenty worse things.

Unfortunately my circumstance is that I'm $700 into motorcycle parts this month already, had the belt in the garage, and unexpectedly had no bike to ride to work the next day. (My other bike, a Honda NC700X had an issue... I hate to say related to an aged chain. Clearly I know what I haven't been paying due attention to).

A day of riding suggests things are mostly well. Aside from the belt, nothing else was done other than removing debris from the failed belt and generally cleaning out the case with some compressed air.

Did you clean any gunk off the inside faces of the variator and the clutch?

The last belt blow up I took care of (not mine, I might add) there was substantial goop and crud on the faces of both where the belt touches. I actually had to disassemble the clutch to get those faces cleaned up. You might want to go back in there if you didn't take notice while you were there the first time. Any deviations of those smooth surfaces will chew up a new belt pretty quickly.

I took a look at all of the surfaces, though I was mostly looking for kevlar threads as I'd been advised to remove all of them by my mechanic. They didn't seem to have goop or rubber deposits. It may be a mitigating factor that though the belt had started to come apart, it didn't fail completely. I rode the bike home and into the garage.

There was some fuzz to clean up, but it was nowhere as bad as I'd been lead to believe it could be.