Recent Posts  By   (Read times)

NASA warned that only a #14 arc welders lens would be sufficient (those are rated for a 550 amp arc) and that the lenses on welding goggles would not. Too many folks showed up at work yesterday with the bargain gas welding goggles from Harbor Freight thinking they would be protected. Security monitored the revelers and warned those with the gas welding goggles to turn away and watch the live video display being projected in the cafeteria instead.

I read too and there are some common themes on the troublesome Vespa. It was stored outside, was not used for several years and stored full of gasoline, never changed the oil, never flushed the coolant, heavily modded and the modifications failed.

Changing the oil and filter every 3,500 to 6,250 miles, flushing the brakes and coolant every 2 years and replacing the belt every 12,500 is not what one would consider heavy expensive maintenance.

Yes I have helped people who have ruined all brands of bikes or bought used ones that were ridden hard and put away wet which was not the fault of the bike and a few times I have found some that were truly defective however those defectives were not concentrated on the Piaggio bikes.

On the Cannon Ball run its more the rider than about the bike. And yes in that competition a smaller newer bike in the hands of the original owner that goes farther on a tank of gas can give a rider an advantage over a 5, 10 or 20 year old larger used bike regardless of the brand.

Leo - If a guy like this who works for a rural gas company can do it then anyone can:



The concept is really not that different from the vapor generators used in gasoline powered stoves and lamps such as your Coleman 425 or 413 stoves from over the past century or so.

Here is a multi-fuel version of the old Petromax vapor lamp which has been redesigned to burn anything from kerosene, gasoline, diesel, citronella, used crankcase oil, jet fuel to olive oil. These guys are local to me and I have verified that this thing can burn just about any fuel with the only real gotcha is that if its too thick of an oil base such as goopy black old crankcase oil you need to mix it with a 50/50 blend of something thinner that will cut it and if its got a lot of solids in it obviously put it through a filter. Using of a capfull of a good carb cleaner such as the Berryman product that you will see me recommending every 10th tank of fuel is recommended.


Some of the Esoteric will cry foul however if these simple homey folk can do it then it can't be that impossible.

That's a personal opinion on the Vespa however when I was at the local multibrand dealer with the new Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Aprilia, Vespa, Piaggio and Eaton bikes all side by side in a row the Yamaha were not a clear winners nor were they twice the bike although they are nice bikes. The only twice I saw on the showroom floor looking at all those brands together at the same time was that you got almost twice the CC on the new Aprilia and some Piaggio models for the same price as the new Yamaha and Honda. Yes there are some TestaDura here who don't want to understand that you have to shop around and such but the deals are out there. I went shopping without any brand loyalty or bike bigotry ingrained and just shopped for best value and stumbled in during the Spring Factory Incentive Sale which if I had checked Piaggio's Web Site I would have known about in advance. No need to post MSRP lists as when you walk into a dealership those suggested prices are not carved in stone. Even a Lance or Sym for example has over a 30% margin on it ($800 to $900 markup) that can be reduced by the dealer if they want to go for profit on high volume sales.

I almost signed on a Honda CTXN 700 DCT during their Garage Sale Event last year since the loss leader was on sale new for $4,999 however the DCT then had hunting and pecking issues that still existed and was not as smooth as I would have preferred plus it had that brake pedal way up front that I really do not like along with a very low seating position which after a while on the test ride made it hard on my bad left knee supporting the bike. If there were only two of the three issues allowing me to more constantly use my right leg to balance the bike I probably would have penned my name on the bottom line. Like I said I am not a brand bigot and will consider anything that is on sale for a reasonable price and meets my requirements.

On Yamaha quality overall well I have helped enough people over the years with Yamaha Scooters and Motorcycles with a variety of issues that sometimes even makes the Chinese stuff from 2007 to 2009 look great and yes there were many issues that they caused themselves. Remember the Yamaha starters that would strip out every few thousand miles due to poor design, fairly recent Yamaha and Star models with factory exhausts that blocked oil filters from being changed without removal of the header pipes and requiring the replacement of frightfully expensive seals, etc, etc to call out just a few. On the old Yamaha Scooters its also quite a bit harder to find parts than on the old Piaggio unless its a Yamaha that the Chinese have cloned and kept the parts available for. None are perfect as they are contrivances of men.

People call scooters Vespa generically in Italy and many other parts of the world even when its a Chinese bike just like people here call most motor homes Winnebago's because they were the first with market presence. Its sad though that some people can still mess up a 100,000 mile plus capable Piaggio powered bike and trash it at relatively low mileage.

No need to post about the few that have messed up their bikes or bought one off Craigs List that somebody else already messed up and posted multiple times about it blaming everyone else on the planet for what they likely caused themselves or were cheated on by the previous owners selling the bikes to distance themselves from the problems they caused.

That does not change the fact that they had achieved quality matching the Big4 which Harley was and is not anywhere close to doing and truth be told they were not doing that badly overseas until new Euro pollution regulations came out that blocked sale of most Victory product to the majority of the World without a radical redesign which was the final death stroke. The stiffer Euro standard caused many bike makers to drop all their VTwin Air Cooled bikes from the Euro Market (Europe, Africa and Asia) not just Victory/Polaris.

Dollar - They were assembled by some amazing craftsmen and yes it was an amazing accomplishment for the time but some involved were not as good team players as the rest. Biggest hurdle we faced was lack of conformity between the different orbiters so no really common parts existed between them aside from some standard electrical parts and the more basic hardware items along with a smattering of other items. It was not like having three Dodge Darts and being able to swap a fender, door or bracket from one to another. Every one required a separate set of thousands of hand made drawings to maintain with some of them hanger wall sized and it was becoming a monumental task to deal with over time. The only major area that was fully vetted out in a 3D CAD system toward the end that we were aware of was the cargo bay and robotic deployment arm.

I did not simply read an internet blurb or article about it or come up with this by conjecture but I am speaking as one who was there on the contracting team tasked with a financially viable means to convert all these various drawings that were to different scales and on a variety of media into a common computer based library. Nothing available at the time could handle it and meet the budget constraints due to the large manual effort that would have been involved. There was also the major hurdle of getting every agency to agree on whether to use Cadia, MicroStation or Autocad with each camp deeply entrenched. I felt that since so much work on the cargo bay and deployment systems had already been done in MicroStation which is a pretty large section of the structure that building off of that would have been the most logical. However it was all cancelled.

Leo - I truly believe people like that did in part build the Space Shuttle. I worked on the team trying to rescue it from what they had done but we couldn't because of the great cost involved in just unitizing the design in a CAD environment which was a very sad thing for all involved. Some may also cry bunk on that but I worked with the Joint Chiefs, NASA, British Aerospace and a number of other agencies on that one and there just was not enough money allocated to pull it off. I was there in the thick of it so I know what we discussed in our conference rooms and how many different ways we tried to fix things but alas we were told to stand down and let it pass. There are some folks no matter how brilliant others think they are or they think themselves would have left me no choice but to hand them a pink slip for misconduct if they worked for me.

Now before we allow these folks to get us to vent too far and get ourselves banned maybe we should step away for a few and chill doing something we enjoy. No sense in getting ill over this as you need to think more about your wife and family too since they need you so very dearly as they face their existing health issues. I say this with all humility and respect.


Kind regards,

Rocky