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| Paper thin gearbox gasket |
This 1974 Vespa Ciao pitiful 40 year old gearbox gasket finally started to leak no matter how tight I torqued the bolts holding on the gearbox cover. That's 90W gear oil in there and it would gradually creep into that little opening by the brake lever and the oil would ruin my rear brake shoe. Then I'd clean it off and dry it out and a few weeks later it would be oily again. Eventually all the oil would run out and then the gearbox would be dry which is even worse than having no rear brake.
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| Gearbox is singular in my case. |
I grew tired of this cycle of brakeless motoring so I dove in and recut the gasket with my own heavy duty head gasket felt and put some gasket sealer in there and bolted it back together and rebuilt the carb while I was getting dirty.
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| Oggy, living a real romantic life |
A 17 year old student chased me down on the street wanting to buy my Ciao and I just shook my head. He said his family is from Italy and I said he'd be better off saving his money and going to Italy to buy one because this moped demands more work than most people can give to it. Keeping this moped running with no access to parts, abusive rock roads and lack of any suspension is a full time job. But if this moped were a motorcycle I would've died long ago because the roads have no lights and a huge speedbump or pothole will suddenly appear, or a dog, or a bus with no lights. The moped doesn't go fast enough to be a threat. I'm really hoping this project solves something so I can move on to the next project.
*My post titles are now tributes to the modern trend of reporting news like movie spoilers.
