Ok, here is the second part of my report. I call it the pre easter scooter nightmare. If you want to know why, read on.
My intention, aim , goal was to find the best, easiest and quickest way to do do a rear tire change on a Kymco Like.
And I found it - in parts. Unfortunately I failed twice, and at the very last step so terribly that I am in deep trouble now with the scooter.
Giving you this as a "teaser", let´s now put some detail on it.
1. Put the scooter on centerstand higher with a 2 inch piece of wood. Easy but not necessary.
1. Disconnected Oxygen sensor cable. Easy
2. Removed muffler. More or less easy with some patience to find the right angle to get it out.
3. Removed both damper bolts and lowered the gear down to maximum. You will get maybe 2 inches more clearance. Easy.
4. Loosened and removed wheel nut with large torque wrench. Easy after locking the brake levers with a large zip-tie. Easy. No flipover of scooter.
5. Removed rear brake caliper after loosening the rear brake lever. Easy.
6. Now here is one of the interesting parts of this report. I could easily remove the fork by hand, released the air out of the tire and just bent the fender hugger up and out of the way along with the damper backwards and pulled the wheel out pretty easily, squeezing the tire a little here and there. But the oil dipstick must be removed also for this step. So that was a very easy and quick one. And totally painfree.
7. Attempts to get the old Kenda tire off the rim (breaking the bead and taking it off afterwards) was the first part of the nightmare. Thought seriously about bringing it to the tire shop. But I wanted to get the job done, so I continued and lost pacience afte a while and used pretty much force with the mounting irons, neglected the rim protection and scratched my rim pretty severely just to get it off. So, if you dont have the propper tool, let the tire shop do it. Stig/Tom did the absolute right thing here. Next time I will have my tires changed or at least the old ones removed by a tire shop, for sure.
8. Mounting of new reinforced tire was also tough, tougher than the front tire, but with some fearless force and more scratches on the rim, I could get it on too.
9. Balanced the wheel with 40grams, 20 on each sie of the rim (4x5g pieces on each side).
10. Replaced the bearing in the fork with the new one. Wasn´t really necessary, old one was still good imho. Old one is a TPI bearing with some extra clearance (C3). Removing of old bearing was tough and could only be done at home by heating the fork up pretty heavily with a heat gun (switch position 2) and then pull out the bearing with a bearing puller tool with slide hammer - which I orderd from Amazon UK some weeks ago.
New bearing installed frozen into the newly heated fork with a 30mm socket and a hammer. That went pretty well and easily.
11. Reinstalling of tire was easy again, even with full infalted new tire. Similar to the removal. Quick and easy.
12. Same thing with the rest of the job until the muffler installation. My second and actual nightmare...
13. Before installing the muffler I repainted it with black heatresistant paint. Very beautiful, looks like a new muffler.
14. After the muffler has dried overnight, I installed the shiny "new" muffler to the scooter yesterday. Like Stig/Tom I used some ropes to hold the muffler approximately in place for fixing the headnuts. This method works great.
I felt a bit in a hurry for some unrational reasons and wanted to get it done quickly (lack of patience). Before doing that I extra looked up the torque specs for the exhaust bolts (head and fork). I do have several maintanace books for torque specs. Long story short, I must have had a total blackout, was confused yesterday and mixed up the torque values totally.
So I ended up - with my worst nightmare so far - overtightening the headbolts and stripped out at least one cylinderhead aluminium thread.....the other one holds so far, but probably also overtightend already.
This is of course now a complete gamechanger. Terrible. Failing so badly (shame on me)
short before the finishing line is disapointing. But now it is what it is. I need to find a way to get it either repaired with helicoil, time sert or something similar or try it myself with the right tools. But there is only one try left. After that a new cylinder head would probably be needed. Problem is, that I don´t kow anyone who is specialized for that and has the propper tools to do the job correctly.
These two bolts and threads can be reached from underneath, but its not much space, centerstand is close.
Already talked to some mechanics. Might be a expensive job. Maybe pulling the whole engine out of the frame? Or pulling the cylinder head?
Without pulling the engine/head, the scooter must be lifted into the air somehow with ropes, to get the required free space to work from underneath the scooter.
At the moment the scooter is more or less "grounded" and I am quit a bit puzzled what to do next and best. Will think about it over the long weekend.
Any helpful ideas from your side?
Just as an advise and a reminder, manifold headbolt torque spec is 15NM. (M6).
I also add again some pictures to show parts of the work.
And never forget, DIY is not always the best and cheapest way of maintanance.....
