Moped Maintenance Today...

After a long trip, I've mentioned that the rear break cable snapped because of fraying. Since then I've ordered a new one from treatland, brakes that I bought. Hopefully the brakes come tomorrow because they are easy to install, literally they take a minute to install and then probably 5 minutes adjust. This brings me to a point, check brake cables if you haven't in the past month or so.

Anyhoo, moped is down so its a good time to double check and fix things. One thing that I wondered about was my chain and how worn out it is, there are many methods of doing this. One is to check by stretching some links and see how much travel it has between the rollers and the chain. Mine didn't have much give between them but I'm no expert and I'm guessing it was the original chain. Another way to check wear is to see how bad its worn laterally, basically lifting it up on the side and see how much it sags. If it doesn't sag at all its good if withing a couple of feet it sags all the way down its pretty much worn. Now mine needs to be changed soon but since I didn't see any wear when I was changing tires so I think it'll be a later purchase.

One thing that I am doing is cleaning up the old chain so that I can get several more hundred miles out of it without to much more wear on it. Since grease and grit picked up during normal usage will constitute the vast majority of the wear. The best way I've heard is use gas, kerosene, or diesel, since those are quite expensive at the moment I was able to get some free jet fuel, basically when they check the fuel they have to check visually for water, so thats what I got.

Items that I used was a metal container and some safety wire. I took the safety wire and attached it to the chain where the master link would go, this is so that when I'm done I don't have to fish out the chain with my fingers since jet fuel is smelly. Once done placing it in the container, I poured in one quart of jet fuel into it and placed the lid on and shook it. Currently I'm letting it set over night and then I'll most likely take it out and clean it with a rag tomorrow. I'll probably save the jet fuel to...

Heres some pictures...

Oh yeah, heres a picture of a looped brake cable, if you have a moped and ever loose the karp, please fix your brake cables right. I understand that this is the cheap way but its half arsed and should be replaced!

(The cable is the think in middle of the picture thats going over the edge of my tool bag)


Remember clean parts work better then dirty ones and will wear less during operation!

Take a slow ride and take it easy...