Scooter update- the second time around

I had a really nice post all written at the end of the day at work but I decided to send it home so I could work on it tonight before posting it. And somehow, it got lost, somewhere out there in the internet someplace. Rats!

First of all, thanks to Power Sports Factory for getting my parts to me in a timely way so that I could get it put back together over the weekend. I don't remember if I wrote about this already but I had the 2nd mirror mount bracket fall off and I didn't feel like fabricatiing a new one myself. So I bought a new set of handlebars instead. Those arrived Friday along with a new air intake tube.

So I got the handlebars installed with no drama and I moved onto my new horn installation. Last week on The Scooter Scoop there was an article about the Wolo Bad Boy horn. I wasn't really looking for a new horn, exactly, but later the same day, I was in Harbor Freight and guess what I found, the same horn! Interestingly enough, the price I paid was 10 dollars less than the Harbor Freight webpage, making it 15 bucks less than the the price on the Wolo webpage!

I had to build a bracket from a piece of angle iron and another piece of strap that fastens underneath the front fork, above the fender. Everything went together beautifully except that I couldn't make the relay work with a direct wire from the battery. I ended up just using the original wires from the stock horn and upping the fuse amperage to keep from blowing the fuse when blowing the horn. I actually had 2 relays that I couldn't actuate no matter how I applied power to them.

There's a dandy loud horn under my scoot now that hopefully will be effective at keeping the cell phone chatting, mascara applying, Tahoe drivers out of my lane during my daily commutes.

Once I had all the wires put back together, I went to work on my continuing carburetor problems. I've had a repeated problem with the inlet manifold not sealing causing vacuum leaks and those cause the engine to die whenever its sitting still. As you might guess, this makes daily commuting a real pain! I also wanted to try to remove the air intake tube and get the air filter installed directly on the carb mouth, a typical hot-rodding technique.

Its not so easy! I tried 4 different jetting combinations, going bigger in both the pilot jet and the main jet in a couple different steps, all to no avail. Removing that 12 inches of air tube creates a horrible bogging condition whenever the carb gets up to the main jet. The bogging is so bad that the scoot is unrideable. So I used the new air tube that Power Sports had provided with my air cleaner in its usual spot above the engine, left in some of the bigger jets and now my scooter runs just fine with even more power on the top end than I had before this tinkering effort.

So I'm back to commuting on the scooter again and everything seems good. I have to admit that I am shopping for a real motorcycle to replace the Phantom. I missed this good looking BMW R65 just today because the seller didn't call me back first! When I did speak to him he said that he could have sold several of them from the response he got from his ad. So, I'll keep looking. Sweetie says I can't have the Yamaha Morpheus Morphous that I've been ogling, at least for this summer...

So if there are any experts out there, I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong with my carb jetting efforts. And I'd really like to get some relays working under my scotter's nose cone so I'll take expert advice on those too!