Modern Vespa

OK, it had been around 1,000 miles since my last service at a top NJ Vespa dealer. Part way through a long days ride I was going down a VERY steep hill on a dirt road in George Washington Nat. forest. I was suprised when I looked down and saw the dashboard lights all lit up. The bike had stalled. It had never stalled in the last 6,000 plus miles.

I restarted the bike and continued on. Around 50 miles further the bike started to break up. It felt like fuel starvation. It ran all right at low speed and would cut out at high speed.

Bottom line, the air filter was loaded with oil. Could this have been because of the steep hill at idle speed? Any ideas? It's cleaned out and running fine right now. This is a first for me.

1. Has the scooter ever fallen over? If it fell on the left side, it would cause the filter to fill up with oil from the crankcase. If it hasn't fallen over....go to #2

2. Check your oil. If your oil is up to the proper level then MOST LIKELY, the shop over-oiled your filter when they serviced the scooter.

You need to clean out the excess oil in the filter/filter box and clean and re-oil the filter properly. Then ride it and see if it happens again. If it didn't fall over recently, I think that the shop over-oiled the filter but the only way to know is to clean it an see if it does it again.

Good luck

The scooter has never been dropped. I'am willing to believe #2 but why the stall? It's all been cleaned out, so now I wait and see.

When the filter/filter box is saturated with oil, the excess oil gets sucked in with the air mixture and causes the erratic running.. When you cleaned it out, was the excess oil, engine oil which will show up as a black color on the filter? Or, was it excess air filter oil which should not be nearly as dark?

No it was engine oil. Could it get sucked in from a steep downhill instead of a fall over? I guess that's my question. Would it be more likely to be sucked/leaked in if overfilled? I had at least 1,000 trouble free miles since the service. Most of them run at a pretty good speed.

We have a LOT of steep hills & mountains around the area where we live and we've never had this happen on either of our scooters so I think you can rule that out..............UNLESS, if the oil was overfilled, it can wind up in the airbox. I would think that if it was overfilled, it could possibly exacerbate the problem if you went down a very steep hill. I would check my oil level and make sure it is at the correct level and then replicate the circumstances where it happened before, Good luck. Please let us know what happens.

Look at Turkman's solution in the following thread:
MP3 500 air filter filling with oil, any ideas why?