The part came last week to fix my 250cc scooter and with just a few fumbles and choice words I had it back together. While I'm kicking myself for not getting to the bottom of the shaking at starts from a standstill I take solace in knowing that a dealer told me this is the third broken transmission shaft he's heard of. The first happened to his own and has gone 17,000 miles since the replacement. It wasn't pretty to see the broken shaft, but it was interesting.


In case you're not technically i...
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This past Sunday I had a mechanical failure from a totally unexpected source. Galileo, my new 250 scooter, gave a strange shriek, shook a little and then stopped moving. I thought, "Darn. The drive belt broke." Fortunately I had my cell phone and Sara raced out to help me load it into our pickup truck and get it home. No simple matter, actually, as it took help from five strong men to load it in and three other helpers and gravity to get it off the truck. Then I opened up the side cover to di...
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Most people mark the end of summer on Labor Day but I like to get a little extra out of it. Since the twenty-first of September is nine days away I'm rolling along wrapped in the confidence that it will be riding season for quite a while longer. My 250 scooter (Galileo) is beginning to close in on the number of commutes that the 150 Chinese scooter accomplished. Today marked its twenty-third trip to work against twenty-seven for the 150. Considering that I've only had Galileo for six weeks th...
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I noticed today that the 250 Chinese scooter (Galileo) was fast approaching 2,850 on its odometer. As I told Marc, that means that my Helix replica has acquired 1,000 miles since I purchased it. As a commuter vehicle it has made eighteen trips to the job in the month or so since I picked it up. It has made the trip much shorter in terms of time over the smaller Chinese bikes I formerly used, taking about twenty minutes to do the 17.5 mile one way commute instead of the half hour or 35 minutes...
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