A thing that happened - loose jets

My pickup truck has been giving me trouble lately and I am in the process of hunting down the problem. It's something simple. I know it is. Still, pain in my ass.

I needed to take the truck to the muffler shop and loaded the Elite 80 in the back so I could ride it home. It was riding well most of the way but on the last stretch of road, it sort of popped and lost about 80% power. My brain began running down a list of possible problems.

I pulled over to check the exhaust. It was clear with some white puffs. That's good. Black exhaust would mean it was burning oil and something serious had happened. The engine died and when I started it again, it would not idle on it's own. I had to hold the throttle open. I nursed it the last couple of hundred feet home and parked it.

I checked the vacuum and fuel lines. I checked the spark plug cable was tight. I pulled the carburetor and opened the bowl to check the jets and found the problem. The idle jet had vibrated loose. It hadn't fallen out, but had worked itself back enough that the vaporizing vents had been covered.

While I had the carb open, I went ahead and cleaned the jets and passageways. Once I had it all back together, it ran better than it did before.

Honda Elite 80

I bought an Elite 80 for not much a few months ago. It was completely apart but I could tell from the box of parts that it wasn't a great looking scooter. The surface of the side panels were very faded. So much that when I removed the stickers the letters were left behind in relief. Look at the panel on the left below. The lower right corner of the 0 is missing because the sticker had peeled off a long time before. 

I washed the panels with soapy water and then sanded and painted them. I went with Rustoleum's basic Red. I thought about different colors but my friend Rob said "Hondas should be red" and I had to agree with him. I have an air compressor and paint gun. I wet sanded the panels between coats. 

This one is from somewhere in the middle of the process. You can see the raised letters from where the stickers were. I thought about sanding it down completely but I decided it didn't take away from anything. 

The work table looked pretty gory afterwards. 

One of the reasons I was considering a different color besides red was this white seat. I didn't like the white and couldn't come up with a good color to balance it all out. Steve suggested I paint the rims white. The whole color scheme fell into place. 

I pulled the wheels off and took them and the new tires up to my local tire shop. When the new tires were on, I taped off the rims. 

Steve was right. The rims help balance out the white seat. While it was off, I painted the muffler with high temp black BBQ pit paint. I also took all the faded black plastic pieces and used some restoring polish to make look a little less burnt out. Most of the pieces were there as I put it back together although not everything went back together as tightly as I would like. I still think it looks pretty good for a 20 something year old scooter.

Thanks Rob and Steve for your scooter decorating tips.