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Joy’s Scooter

Today was a busy day, but most of it was spent receiving and assembling Joy’s new scooter. I also went to class, of course, drove out to the edge of the county to return the tiller to the equipemt place, and then made it all the way home by 11AM — sharp. This is when the scooter was scheduled to arrive.

The scooter finally came at 12:45. It was in this cardboard box, but underneath the cardboard was this metal frame that was painted red, but very poorly because the paint would come right off.
We (Mike, Joy and I) had to take the bike off the frame by disassembling the frame, then we had to assemble this thing. Assembly required a lot of engineering skills. Our engineering tasks were poorly written out in the instructions in an English which used a Chinese interpretation of English grammar. Word economy must have been a big deal to them too, because they left many, many things unsaid… or unwritten.
Anyway, Joy built the battery (think chemistry 2046 lab on steriods here. She had to add the acid to the base in each of six compartments of the battery and then do some other stuff I didn’t pay enough attention to) She also screwed on the rear-view mirrors.
Mike and I put on the front tire, the brakes, attached the stearing column and we did some other stuff that wasn’t challenging enough to be memorable.
Oh yeah, we had to put oil in it, and gas it up at the end too. That was the part we knew about at the begining of the day though.
Unfortunately, this may all be in vain, because Joy didn’t get the right color bike. There’s more to it than that though. It wasn’t even the right bike at all. It looks completely different from the picture! lol! No, seriously there are some major issues with this thing. We were told that we’d just have to add oil and gas and then drive it. There are scratches on it from shipping. The speedometer doesn’t always work. The gas tank doesn’t lock properly. The biggest problem, though, is that the electric start never worked. This is a HUGE issue to me, because you basically have to kick-start it like you would a lawn mower. OK, maybe the gas cap not locking is big too. I can’t decide.
Anyway, the scooter is cool. I like the color more than the color Joy picked out, I don’t mind the scratches, and I think that a mechanic can fix the other problems for less than $100, which would still make this scooter a great deal.
It can hold 200 kilos (more than 400 pounds) and still go 55+ Km/h (35 MPH) with two people on it. With just one person it really flies… think 45 to 50 MPH. Also, it goes almost 70 miles on one gallon. (Note: this bike is Chinese everything is in metrics so the tank holds about 5 liters of gas and will then go over 100 Km on that one tank.)
It’s silver and black.
K, that’s all I can think of for now. I totally lost steam when writing this so it now putters to a stop.

Posted by David under Personal News |