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Now at 400 miles, with an average 80mpg over the last 100 miles or so. No more problems. I did change the spark plug for an iridium tip version. Doesn’t seem to have made any difference, but I wanted a spare anyway so I thought I’d try the iridum tiped plus and keep the original as the spare.

I did fix a problem with one of the turn signals in the mirror that has been there ever since I received the scooter. It’s an LED and there was a bad soldered joint. Easy to fix but it took about an hour to figure out how to take the mirror apart to get at the wiring. All the decorative “chrome” (plastic) trim had to be removed from the mirror. The plasic used is pretty brittle, so it’s very hard to get off without breaking the plastic “clips” that hold it in place. Luckliy it stays put even with one of the clips broken off. The quality of the wiring job wan’t very impressive and I’m not surprised that one of the soldered joints failed. The wires weren’t twisted together before soldering, just laid side by side.

Well, we’re at 300 miles no with no new problems. Over the last 75 miles the scooter achieved just over 80 mpg. Routine checks showed no bolts loosening and no visible oil consumption.

I did remove the spark plug to check its condition. It was an NGK plug, which is s good sign (better than a Chinese plug of unknown origin anyway!). The electrode was light tan in color with no obvious deposits, indicating that the engine is running well. Black deposits would indicate a rich mixture, a glazed insulator would indicate overheating. Various other color deposits, errosion, corrosion, all indicate problems from oil buring to incorrect fuel/air ratios.

I also removed the CVT cover to take a look at the belt and drive system. All seemed good. The belt was maufactured by Gates, a well known drive belt supplier and looked new (as it should after only 300 miles.

I’ve now taken the scooter to an indicted 50mph on a couple of occasions, which is probably closer to 45mph in reality. All seemed stable. I’m still not using full throttle at any time and I’m normally keeping the speed to an indicted 40 mph or less, since the scooter is still “breaking in”. Once I pass 500m I may open it up a little more.

Having finally (after almost a month) got the scooter legally registered I checked the oil levels, filled the gas tank and too it out for a ride. It rode for 25 miles over a couple of days, keeping the speed down to the 25-30mph region. Using a GPS unit I found that the speedometer was about 10% optimistic (when it read 30mph the true speed was 27mph), but the oddometer was quite accurate and calibrated in miles. I’ve read some reports of oddometers calibrated in km, but mine wasn’t.

After 25 miles I changed the oil in both the engine and transmission. Who know what type of oil was put in at the factory. It may be good or it may be bad, but an oil change on a scooter is so cheap and easy that there’s no reason not to do an early oil change. I used Castrol GTX 10-30W in the engine and Castrol Hypoid Gear Oil EP80W-90 in the transmission. After 200 miles I did a second oil change. During the break-in period there is additional wear on the engine and scooters like mine don’t have an oil filter like car does. They have a mesh screen filter which will catch large chunks of metal and metal shavings OK, but which won’t remove suspended metalic particulates which are generated as the engine goes through the break-in process of smoothing out the moving surfaces. An oil change on a scooter takes under 5 minutes and costs about $3. Why not do it often.

There are many schools of thought on how to break and engine in. Some recommend the very slow and lengthy approach (20 mph for the first 100 miles, 25 mph for the next hundred, 30 mph for the next 300 miles and 40 mph for the next 500 miles). Few, if any, riders have that much patience!

There’s also a school of thought that says you get better rusults with a very fast break-in, in which you run the engine very hard as described here http://www.mototuneusa.com/break_in_secrets.htm. I’m not so sure that would be a good idea with a scooter, and I certainly didn’t feel like testing it out on mine.

What I did was to keep the speed low (30 mph) for the first 100 miles, with no rapid acceleration, no “wide open throttle” and varying the speed (no constant speed cruising). Over the next 100 miles I’ve been keeping the speed below 40 mph and again trying not to hold a contant speed for more than a few minutes. I’m still using Castrol GTX 10-30W. It’s an oil I’ve used for many years in all sorts of engines including highly tuned turbos. I would not use synthetic oil in a scooter, especially during the break in period. Once the engine is broken in properly (after around 1000 miles) I may go to a synthetic blend oil. However changing the oil frequently is probably much more important for engine life then exactly what brand of oil you use.

Back in July, after a week or two of searching the web and a few futile attempts to order scooters which were out of stock I finally placed an order for a 150cc Chinese Scooter from Bike2go.com. Why them? Because they didn’t seem any worse than any of the other distributors…

…three weeks later and with no sign of anything being shipped I called them up and complained that if something wasn’t shipped out in the next few days I was canceling my order…

…and the next day I got notice of shipment! I tracked the order via the shipping number and eventually it ended up in a town about 20 miles away from me at the shipping depot there. I’d expected them to call me and arrange delivery, but of course they didn’t. I called them and they said “when do you want it?”. I said “How about tomorrow” and sure enough the next day a tuck pulled up and delivered a large cardboard box weighing about 300lbs.

Inside the box was a steel cage in inside the cage was the scooter. It wasn’t the first color I ordered (yellow), but at least it was my alternate color (red). It took about 30 minutes to take all the bolts holding the cage together and release the scooter from its prison. It was mostly assembled. Both wheels were attached, but I had to install the mirrors, the seat, the rear trunk, the rubber matting on the deck and the battery.

Prior to installing the battery I had to add the acid which was supplied in a sealed plastic bottle. Not too difficult. The rest of the assembly was pretty straightforward, which is just as well since the “instructions” were minimal at best and undecipherable at worst.

After priming the carburetor with fuel and waiting about 30 minutes for the battery to come to life I tried the electric starter on the scooter and on the second attempt, it burst into life (thankfully not into flames) and idled at around 1500rpm as it should. All the lights worked except for the turn signal in one of the mirrors. The one that did work was so dim that nobody would ever see it anyway, so that didn’t concern me too much.

I checked most of the visible nuts and bolts for tightness and didn’t find anything that was obviously loose.  The tires had around 80psi air pressure in them which is WAY too much, so I bled out air until they were at the recommended 35psi. The oil levels were OK and the brakes seemed to work so I rode the scooter up and down my driveway a few times and all seemed OK.

Then we come to the paperwork saga….The dealer is supposed to send an MSO (Manufacturer’s Statement of Origin), which is required in order to register the scooter (at least in NJ it is). After requesting one a week later it arrived and I was off to the DMV. Unfortunately, the DMV said it was invalid. The manufacturer listed (Roketa) didn’t correspond to the VIN number so they wouldn’t register it. It actually took me a day and a bunch of phone calls to find out why, but it amounts to the fact that the first 3 letters of the VIN number correspond to the manufacturer and my VIN corresponded to JMstar, not Roketa.

So I called Bike2go (who are also Powermaxsports and Deealins), spoke to someone, requested a new MSO, emailed them all the details (since they seemed clueless about what was wrong) and waited. A week later I called back only to find the person I had spoken with had left the company, so I had to go through all the details yet again. Eventually a new MSO arrived which was closer to being correct, but still had errors. I won’t detail exactly what the problems were, but let’s just say it took me about 2 hrs at the DMV before they took pity on me and allowed me to register the scooter. They tried to give me “moped” plates since the invoice described the scooter as a “moped”, but I managed to convince the DMV that a 150cc scooter couldn’t be a moped.

I’m still trying to get a revised MSO with all the correct details including the correct VIN number and the correct spelling of the manufacturer’s name. It’s now mid-September, remember I placed the original order in mid-July, but at least the scooter is registered, inspected, insured and street legal now.

I have 200 miles on the scooter so far with only two incidents, one major, one minor. The major incident occurred at about 125 miles. At the end of a 10 mile trip I stopped, hauled the scooter up on its center stand and noticed a small pool of gasoline under it. I was hoping that it had been left by a previous car parked in the same spot, but no luck. When I tried to start the scooter again, gas poured out of somewhere under the engine.

After much looking, cranking and gas leaking I finally identified the problem. A screw at the end of a hose which connected to the drain port of the carburetor float chamber had come lose. Tightening the screw cured the leak. I guess I was lucky. Nothing caught fire and I didn’t lose all the gas so I could ride home OK. I found a couple of posts on the web where the same thing had happened to others, so it’s not an isolated incident.

The minor problem was an intermittent headlight. It would tend to go out when the steering was all the way to one side. I tracked that down to a connector which had popped out of the nylon holding bock. Once I pushed it back in place, everything was fine.