Scooty Puff Jr, Making It Legal

It was time to make Scooty a bit safer, and a bit closer to legal again.

The main reason the previous owner stopped using the scooter was due to the rear brake lever being broken, thus leaving the scooter in an unsafe to ride state.

The broken lever was only one of many things that weren’t up to legal standards. The indicator switch was broken, the headlight didn’t work, and both mirrors were missing. Being such a newbie to two wheels, there was no way I had the confidence to ride with so many things wrong. Even just missing mirrors was bad enough!

I gathered some parts from Trademe, and after work the other day, I made a start on getting it back up to scratch.

Suzuki made these things pretty easy to work on. Just a couple of screws and the whole front part splits in half

As it turns out, the headlight has a blown low beam, but strangely, the bulb was also installed backwards. Spun it around, and BAM, I have high beam. Success.

The brake lever was a little bit more work. To make it easier for me I chose to just change the lever, not the whole mount on the bars. This was easy, one little 8mm nut on the underside, and a screw on the top and the lever comes out.

The rear brake works now, as does the brake light. It’s not overly effective, so I may give it a slight adjustment, but it does work.

Next up was the indicator switch. The one on the scooter felt horrible when switched, and the indicators just didn’t work. Sometimes if you got rough with it, an indicator might illuminate and stay on, but no flashing.

I purchased a replacement set of switches off Trademe. The indicator switch felt a lot better, but I still wanted to give it a quick overhaul before installing. I stripped the switch down, cleaned the old grease out, and slathered the insides in dielectric grease.

The switches are secured to the housing by a series of screws. Remove them, and the whole lot just comes out.

Now that I have working indicators, mirrors were the only other thing to do.

I purchased a set of generic universal scooter mirrors off Trademe. They arent flash, but they were cheap. With all the shrouds back on it was just a matter of screwing the mirrors into place, securing the locknut, and adjusting them so you can see behind you. Simple, and effective.

With all my newfound features in place, I took Scooty for a quick hoon around the suburb. It runs well, although its smoking a fair bit. Hopefully it’s still just burning out the old 2T oil. It is also getting a bit warm when climbing hills, so I need to fix the duct that’s missing in the front. I still need to work out if I can even get up the massive hill into my suburb, or if I’m limited to hooning locally.