Sep 5, 2008

Updates

Several weeks have gone by and the scooter has continued to deliver reliable service. I usually ride it to work 3 or 4 days a week and run errands on weekends. Starts and runs great every time. I have made a couple small changes to the bike. First, as I mentioned in an early post, the rear fender has been broken. Secondly, the scooter came equipped with a carpet floor mat. Pretty silly idea. It was obvious from the outset that the carpet would not hold up long, so I have always intended to replace it. It's looking pretty bad now so I ordered both these parts from Parts For Scooters. They arrived in less than a week. The fender fit perfectly. The rubber mat I purchased to replace the carpet fits pretty well, but it has little rubber nubs on the underside that fit into holes in the floor of the scooter. Not all the nubs line up perfectly with the holes, so the mat does not lay perfectly flat. But it's darn close. And it's a nice heavy rubber. Should be very durable.

Discussions of the pros and cons of buying a Chinese scooter often center around parts availablity. And rightly so. It's one thing to buy a cheap scooter and know you are going to have to repair it. But if you can't get parts to make the repairs, it doesn't matter how good a mechanic you are. As you may have noticed, I have not bought any parts form the vendor who sold me the scooter. In fairnesss to them, I only tried to call them one day. But after placing a few calls and not getting an answer, I gave up. I don't need them since I own such a generic design. There are several companies who sell all the parts I'll probably every need. Still, it seems like a missed opportunity for Rakatak.

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