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Two things:
Are you a writer by trade - before you became a pirate? ...
Two - Neil may just be right that your post will be of great assistance to any owner facing the same issue ...
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I wondered if you took this on only because you had become becalmed? But no - you have a motor boat.
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ACF-50 is supposed to help with corrosion on motorbikes and such - but your situation would be a real test!
Digging tires off and back onto rims?.....No way - ...not since I was 12 and I had no other choice! That's why God made dealerships.
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I am not a writer by trade, apart from incidental to my career in telecom/computers/networking. It's more of an avocation. I write often; we have, for mostly reasons of our own memory and to keep friends and family apprised of our whereabouts and goings-on, a blog that now goes back two decades in some 2,500+ posts, dating to when we left the world of fixed addresses for a nomadic lifestyle. I'm very wordy, so I am not going to suggest you read it. But if you ask me when my last Like 200i was stolen, or the People 150 before that, I will go back to my own blog to get that answer. I could also tell you when and where I last changed a scooter tire (on my wife's Yamaha Vino 125, also since stolen). Or when I discovered that the reason for a slow leak in that tire later was because I had done the change on a grassy area, and a blade of grass was stuck in the bead.
As far as my post helping others, I of course landed on this thread when I was myself searching for any shred of information on this process. So, yes, I do hope Neil is right and anyone in a similar jam will glean something from it.
The reason for taking this on, up to and including wrestling with the tire irons myself, is simple: The logistics of getting the scooter from the boat to a service shop, and then hanging around long enough for them to get to it, and then getting it back aboard, are actually more daunting than just buckling down and doing it myself. The damage happened in the Bahamas, and I discovered it in the middle of Florida, at a time when we could not linger with a hurricane deadline looming. The Kymco dealer who sold me the tire, reputedly the largest in the nation (Solano Cycles) said three weeks minimum. I'm already in Maryland now -- I could not afford to be just a week north of St. Augustine today.
One of the reasons it took me until yesterday to finish the job is that the same story was playing out with the Honda outboard on our dinghy, which is a far more critical bit of transportation hardware for us, being basically our "family car" if you will. This is the wrong forum, but I made a whole write-up on having to drill out four broken seized bolts from the block after something as simple as needing to replace the thermostat. Here again, at the beginning of summer, outboard shops are backed up a month. Necessity is a mother.
I'll have to look into the ACF-50. I'm using Tef-Gel on hardware as I put it back on (apart from critical torque items like the axle nut and brake bolts), and I have Boeshield as well, but it's a losing battle out here, so I save the spendy chemicals for places where it will do the most good. I though the People 150 and the Yamaha Vino were doing pretty good and still had many years left, even slowly rusting away, but it appears that scooters get stolen before they can age out.
Thanks again for all your help with this; it's great to have this forum as a resource. I don't drop by often (I think my last post was a write-up on putting lamps into the stock turn signal housings), but when I do I always find it helpful.
