Modern Vespa

I went into a Vespa dealer today to buy a water pump O ring. While the service tech was making out the invoice I decided to make some conversation and told him I had accidentally topped it off with the wrong type of coolant and wanted to flush it out. He asked me what I put in it and when I told him Coolanol he said oh that's alright, no problem, you're good.

I said that everyone has been telling me that it's not the right type and shouldn't be mixed with the OEM coolant. I told him that it's because the OEM is OAT and the Coolanol does not say it is.

Again he told me it doesn't make any difference and asked who is everyone who has been telling me this. I told him the Modern Vespa forum. He said well that's your problem. I said what do you mean? He said you can find any answer you want on the internet. I said that I had listened to many people who are very knowledgeable and the preponderance of the evidence pointed to what I told him as being the truth.

I then asked him if they mix Coolanol with the OEM coolant. He said they don't use it anymore but they used to and never had a problem. He said now they use motul. I asked him if that is an OAT coolant. He says it doesn't matter so they don't pay any attention to it.

I believe what I have read about OAT coolant on this forum, and this experience is extremely disappointing...actually almost depressing. There is a huge disconnect between the manufacturer and this dealer. Now I am left wondering how prevalent this is. I know we are supposed to support our local dealerships...but damn!

Internet advice is worth exactly what you pay for it.

Seriously, even I don't take myself seriously.

If I'm wrong? Oops, sorry. I don't recall ever putting myself out there as an expert, though I'm definitely a man with opinions. And no intention to do harm, by the way. But yeah, sometimes I'm wrong. Is what it is. Now, having said that, I've taken some advice from here, and I've ignored it sometimes too. But that's sort of part of life, I think. Take the good with the bad, sift and winnow, and figure out how to proceed. Make mistakes, learn from them, move on.

I consult the shop manuals for any fluid for any of my machines. Mechanics often have their own ideas about what is best and thats often based on what they read in a magazine or hear in a bar.

The shop manuals are based on what the engineers who designed the machines originally sourced from the manufacturers of the fluids and their knowledge of what those fluids were capable of. Having worked at both levels of that piece of design work, both in product design and manufacture and materials sourcing, and knowing the amount of effort that goes into getting those specifications right I always figure its best not to second guess the factory.


unless something seriously wrong is going on in the field, like massive engine failures and recalls. Cause shit happens... because I've been there too. And that stuff can cost you a lot of sleep if you're in the middle of it.

This reminds me of why I took an early retirement...

Each vehicle has its own user and maintenance manual, just refer to that; stick with the manufacturer's directions and you won't have any problems.

Don't feel like the Lone Ranger. I went to my selling dealer (service manager is a highly respected scooter guy - used to own his own dealership) and went through a similar conversation. Wanted to buy a bottle/jug of what they use in the Vespas so I could top it off. He said just use whatever you have in your garage. It's fine. I couldn't believe my ears. I went home and re-read the specs called for and went to work on-line to find out what I could use. Mebbe we over-think this stuff, I don't know. But he also told me not to worry so much with topping off the oil (it barely registered on the dipstick at 500 miles.) had I followed that advice at the time, I'd likely be looking at a fried motor. Only later was that consumption of oil by the HPE's confirmed by Robot. Piaggio should be sending out notices or service bulletins or something. My advice: ask your dealer... then do a little of your own research. And if something seems inconsistent or contrary to what your gut tells you - be reeeal cautious on how you proceed.

We're still a step above reddit though, aren't we?

Aren't we?

I have heard things about reddit. Never been there.

Oh yes, many steps...

And we won't get into what some of the other "one make" sites are like.

Lucky you for finding an honest and knowledgeable mechanic...

I would have no hesitation to bring my vehicle to him, if I had the need for it..

Sorting through all the debate is enough to make one's head spin. You've likely missed all of the oil threads...

I want to get things right, and when in doubt I get a bit too neurotic at times, fearing the worst. I think it pays, generally to be on the side of caution, but it doesn't mean if you don't the world is guaranteed to end. I think in your case it's a good precaution to flush and start over, certainly cheap enough, but if you didn't, you might be okay after all.

As for MV advice, it's a far cry from "internet." There are professionals, and former professionals, that have a lot more experience than the average shop mechanic ("seasoned" sound better?), as well as people who've done the deep dive into technical corners. The lay folks too often have had a lot of experience with things too...so while you may or may not get the final word on a subject, it's great to get some high quality opinions and advice. Yes, sometimes you just have to roll your eyes and move on, but for the most part it's an awesome resource.

I'm strongly feeling a reply from greasy125 coming along shortly...and I'd take my cues from him before too many others, although he might wince a bit at my saying that.

you know what, different strokes for different folks. I strive to keep informed and do massive amounts of research to separate the wheat from the chaff and I take LOADS of interwebs truisms with a giant grain of salt.

when you stop trying to learn about what's going on in your "industry" or your job, that's when you've failed not only your clients, but also yourself.

anyway, find a mechanic that you're comfortable with. I understand that we all come in different flavors. but basically, find somebody you like, somebody you trust and somebody you connect with. from there, you forge a relationship. understand, it is in this person's best interest to keep you on the road. if you're riding you're wearing out stuff. if you're wearing out stuff you're coming back for work-- brakes, tires, belts, etx.

at the end of the day, if a client wants to have a discussion about coolant and what or why I put such and such in, I'm happy to do so. however, I'm not going to say "just cuz that's what I do" there will be a detailed reason for such, with back up data behind it.

ANYWAY, if you're just topping it up? just throw some distilled water in and call it done.

when you flush and bleed, switch to what you, or your mechanic wants to run.

I guess? I dunno? I'm gonna make myself a drink and go pet my cats.

Or instead of citing MV as the source of wisdom he could cite greasy ...that if nothing else is able to respond in kind.

I am far from the be all, end all. there are many more people that are much more informed than I am.

I'm just a dumb ass mechanic.

Don't underestimate yourself, I know that you are not really who you seem to be ... I understand.
Maybe not you are a good mechanic but stupid not, absolutely.

Hmmm...this is not an uncommon attitude. Even my own Vespa main dealer tried to top off my coolant with a totally unsuitable engine coolant after it's first service (but failing to register the fact my bike had a leak!). Had I not stopped him it would have caused considerable damage to water pump and cooling tubes in the rads. The coolant he was about to put in was high is silicates and nitrates. Some of the techs knew to only put in OAT but the guy who was about to top up my coolant (a fully qualified tech) appeared to have no idea about the many different types of coolant and the fact you cannot mix almost any of them together, especially with OAT. Because it can take some time for the damage to come to fruition they either don't ever see the damage they have done, or they know it's going to present later with damage that they can charge someone to fix without being blamed for causing the problem in the first instance. I made an informal complaint to the service manager who to his credit took this onboard and arranged for the guy to get more info on the subject.

Any online research you do will show a myriad of technical and scientific documents and testing from manufacturers and testing houses showing the fact that very few coolants can be mixed. So at the end of the day, it matters not that some ill informed tech doesn't know his subject and tells porkies!

I seriously doubt this...

C'mon, don't burst his bubble!

oh yeah? hold my beer...

Don't you sell yourself short - you are not just a dumb ass mechanic, you are our dumb ass mechanic!

I think a lot of us appreciate your no bullshit participation here.

I'll second that!

...and part time poet!

Occasionally these ideas are based on what they do for a living, and the people they associate with in that industry, including factory service reps that are sent out by the manufacturer to make sure everyone is doing things correctly. You would be surprised at how much more people who work in dealership service departments know than many internet experts.
I don't think I've ever heard one say anything like, "some guy in a bar said to fill your transmission with cheezewizz, so I'm going to do it to all the customer bikes today."

Part of what I consider when trusting advice from someone is how genuine they are about it, whether or not they seem to have an agenda, and how much of an asshole they are. I've heard a shop owner saying everything from MV (and any other site mentioned) is BS, and that they know what they're doing far better than "people on the internet." First of all, I knew that was a straight up lie, second, they were trying to get more folks to spend more money in their shop, and third... well, that always speaks for itself.

I know better than to 100% trust everything I ever read online, but I've generally found MV to be pretty solid overall as far as being a good source for scoot fixin' advice. The folks who tend toward the nefarious don't usually last long around here.

I have been that guy who the engineers talk with when discussing materials for their vehicle designs, so I do understand what you are saying about the dealership level guys and feedback from the factory reps as it was often me the reps were getting that information from.

As for “pub experts” I was secretary for a national vintage motorcycle club for a few years and some of the stuff I heard over a pint at the monthly meetings would make your head spin, there’s some pretty funny ideas out there.

Back to the factory level stuff..., I worked with a bearing manufacturer for many years, providing them with components for systems to be provided to the OEMs for their vehicles, anything that slid, rolled or rotated we were involved, engine, tranny or chassis. During the design and development stages we were often called upon to make suggestions for design or material correction when problems arose during testing. When one of our larger customers was designing their first four stroke engines to replace the two strokes being killed off by emissions laws I was involved in the tensioning system for the OHC drive system. Reviewing the drawings I thought the unit looked strangely familiar, later that night at home it hit me and I ran down to the junk box under work bench and pulled out an old Honda tensioner from the very early 60s and was satisfied to see it was almost an exact match. Normally you keep this shit to yourself but Honda dumped that design about 1965 because it didn’t work reliably and engines were blowing up as a result, hence the “series II” marking on some later 60s Honda twins. So the next day, at a meeting with everyone involved, I tabled my old Honda part and told them they should review their design.
That got me in shit with my bosses and ticked everybody on the engineering team off, how dare I question the customers design.

It was with some satisfaction that I later received the news that production of the new vehicle line had been stopped and about 20000 units recalled for catastrophic engine failures caused by that cam drive... they were months with that line held up awaiting the improved engine design. I did tell them so.

Oh the fun I’ve had! Its so good to be retired from that crap!

... but not all of what has been invented is to be thrown away, some ideas have not been followed up because the suitable materials were not yet available. The idea of ​​the CVT variable speed drive dates back to the early twentieth century but it did not work well due to the materials with unsuitable characteristics and it fell into oblivion. Many other inventions fell into oblivion over the years and were replaced by others apparently only more reliable or because the technological line had taken a different course ... but ...
Some technician shyly remembers something, a note here and there, a hint in an old magazine and after a short time something new comes out that is not new.
An example is the Ackermann suspension used on Yamaha three wheels:

https://www.autotecnica.org/angolo-di-ackermann-storia-e-function/

Translated:

"The invention of the steering kinematics, still used today in modern cars, has its origins as early as the second half of the 1700s, applied to horse-drawn carriages. And the name Ackermann is not even that of its inventor.

History has repeatedly shown that in the field of inventions, it can take a long time before the idea is transformed into an industrial product, a period during which many inventors, technicians or businessmen can manipulate the idea, in an attempt to make it a winner, browsing through patents, publications, lawsuits and requests for compensation.

In the case of Ackermann's corner, from the first theories it took almost 70 years before the patent was filed, while for the practical application it had to wait over a century, when, in a period of great ferment for the birth of the carriages a engine, progenitors of modern automobiles, the adoption of a kinematically correct steering system was universally accepted by manufacturers.

An article published in "The Royal Society of London" (Vol. 56, No. 1, Jan 2002) reveals that the original idea of ​​a differentiated steering was initially conceived by the English physician, philosopher and naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of the most famous Charles), who lived north of Birmingham in the second half of the 1700s.
Every year the scholar was forced to face over 15,000 kilometers on bad roads to visit his patients, aboard carriages that at the time were equipped with a very rudimentary steering system, made by rotating the entire front axle, with the wheels constrained to the axis itself.

A configuration that led to two fundamental problems. The first was that the wheels had to be quite small in order to swing under the carriage frame, and this feature caused enormous inconvenience on the holes, where it would be preferable to have a rolling radius as large as possible to relieve vertical shaking. The second problem was related to safety during very sharp turns: in this phase, in fact, the footprint of the wagon became triangular (as shown in Figure 1-B), and a hollow or a stone was enough to cause the carriage to roll over.

(Figure 1 - The steering used in the first carriages involved the entire rotation of the front axle. This resulted in a triangular footprint of the vehicle during sharp turns, making it unstable.)

To alleviate the danger and inconvenience during his travels, Darwin therefore decided to develop a new concept, where the axle was fixed and the wheels rotated around their own independent axis, no longer being parallel to each other. Furthermore, Darwin realized that to avoid slippage the wheels had to rotate around the perimeter of a circle, whose common center was placed in correspondence with the extension of the rear axle (Figure 2). It was undoubtedly the invention of modern steering.

(Figure 2 - Correct kinematic steering requires that the axes perpendicular to the direction of the individual wheels converge at a point, called the center of instantaneous rotation, located on the extension of the rear axle.)

It is estimated that Darwin had five carriages built with the new steering system, of which three were donated to illustrious personalities, including Prince Edward, younger brother of King George III, and wealthy friend Edgeworth, who did his utmost to make known the system, showing it to the London Society of Arts in 1769, receiving several appreciations.

Darwin, on the other hand, never made an effort to publish his idea, worried that his reputation as an inventor might somehow ruin his reputation as a doctor.

He limited himself to using his own carriages on a daily basis, with the new steering system, testing them for over 30,000 km, thanks to the help of the many servants, of whom a high social class figure such as a doctor in the 1700s had at his disposal.

But the coach builders, informed of the existence of Darwinian steering, considered its realization and repair in case of failure too complicated, and for these reasons they decided not to apply it to their models: it was thus that Darwin's idea was soon forgotten after his disappearance in 1802.

It was revived only 15 years later, in 1817, by the German craftsman Georg Lankensperger, who chose to file the patent in England.

He entrusted the task to his friend Rudolph Ackermann, an expert publicist.
It was curious that, at the time of filing, Ackermann gave his own name to the invention, of which in reality he was only an agent: the official title of the patent was "Specification of Rudolph Ackermann axletrees".

He was soon accused of stealing the invention, charges from which he defended himself by admitting that he was not the inventor but only the agent of Lankensperger, from whom he had received the mandate to file the patent.

Unlike Darwin, Ackermann did his utmost to make the invention known, exploiting his knowledge in publishing (he was the founder of "The Redipository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, etc .."), but he clashed with the usual opposition from manufacturers, not very accustomed to innovations and concerned about the overall reliability of the system.

The text of his patent also had some fundamental errors, in fact he misinterpreted the original concept of Erasmus Darwin and perhaps these inaccuracies were the cause of the delay in dissemination and practical application.

The image of the patent (in Figure 3) in fact showed a decidedly abrupt and exaggerated steering, as much as 62 degrees, so that the center of rotation of the front wheels coincided with the hub of the internal rear wheel, and not with the extension of the axle. rear. An error that most likely made it more complicated to guess how it worked.

It was the turn of the French engineer and builder Charles Jeantaud, in 1878, more than sixty years later, to perfect Ackermann's patent and study its practical application, making it suitable for vehicles equipped with their own traction that began to spread in those years.

Jeantaud introduced a simple quadrilateral into the steering system, positioned inside with respect to the front axle, having the advantages of having a reduced length of the steering rods and being protected from possible impacts from the front.

Jeantaud's quadrilateral interpreted Ackermann's theoretical steering with a high degree of precision, resulting also in a system of easy physical implementation, compact and with only two ball joints.

René Panhard, pioneer of the automotive industry and inventor of the stabilizer bar of the same name, proposed a version of the kinematics mirroring that of Jeanteaud, with the quadrilateral placed in front of the front axle. (both shown in Figure 4)

Both versions are still used today, with due precautions, in modern cars.

In light of this troubled history that has spanned over two centuries, it would be more correct to speak of the invention of Darwin, of the Jeantaud quadrilateral or of Pahard, but we know that injustices in the field of intellectual property are very frequent and so it was that Mr. Rudolph Ackermann, a publicist who served only as a licensed agent, managed to earn a virtually immortal reputation in automobile engineering.

Figure 4 - The quadrilaterals of Jeantaud and Panhard best interpret Ackermann's theoretical concept
Figure 5 shows an example of steering with Jeantaud's quadrilateral. With the same movement of the steering arm, there are two different entities of rotation of the wheels."

Did you like the article?

Can you give me about 5 days to read it?

Of course, you are without a Vespa and you have free time.

TL, DR, I’m at the bar.

Perhaps just a working link to the English site...

Just saying...

Being Vespa-less at the moment (and it being a slow Monday morning here), I did read it. Actually a fascinating story I'd never have known otherwise.

That was so much fun I went back and re-read the thread on Character Set Hell.

I agree with the dealer. antifreeze is antifreeze.

... sorry, I'm lost ...

And oil is oil, amiright?

nice

But is oil antifreeze?

And what about the penguin...

Does oil float?

Remember when the correct oil for your Vespa or Piaggio was Agip, and then it changed to Castrol? What engineering changes were made to the engines that year to make Castrol motor oil better suited for them than Agip? Can you use Castrol oil in the engines where the manual recommends Agip, or will they instantly grenade? Can you use Agip in the newer Vespa engines, or will it hurt them?
Now imagine the person with these "very real concerns" walking into a Vespa dealership with fifty pages they've printed out from MV so the Service Writer can read them all and learn something. That's the private hell of being a Service Writer.
OTOH, I just purchased a 2019 automobile. The selling dealer had just changed the oil, and put in 0w20, which is all the rage now. I know that it is specified for reasons having to do with CAFE numbers and not because it is ideal for the car. So I wanted 10w-40 full synthetic. If you can find the non-US owner's manual for this car, it has a chart that tells you when to use different weights, up to 15w-50. Despite all this, the Dumas who did the change put on the receipt that the oil I chose might void the warranty on the engine.