100mi into the ride and we stop for gas... belt starts slipping pretty good and won't start without the decomp pulled. Ride it another 60mi and the header breaks on my piece mealed together circuit pipe. Limp it back home 40mi.
In all fairness though, I have put a ton of miles on this belt - many of them doubles miles. I can't really complain about this belt. I need to try a malossi (because I hear they're the best!) but I've got a warranty replacement on the gates, so I'll at least be trying another one of those...
It's been real with the stock transmission parts, but I think I'm going to be considering getting rid of my stock vario if I can't get the cheeks I got to not bind and balance - def picking up a euro rear.
My current cheeks ride great for about 20-30 mins, after that ONE weight starts sticking after WOT runs. Variates great until then, but gets stuck. Never had this problem in city riding. I'm really anxious to try the polini anyway and see how much of an improvement it is.
The new cheeks I have are the high travel stock cheeks referenced in one of the other vespa threads on mopedarmy - these are cheeks with the 17xxxx p/n on the cheeks. They have roughly 3mm extra travel (I concurred with Allen Halk's measurements). Stock this variator doesn't variate as far as my notched lower travel variator, but the weights are indeed hitting the wall, and the ramps more aggressive, so I'll have increased travel and accel with the new notched vario. Hopefully, doing some things differently to this one yields a variator that doesn't stick.
One thing that is tempting me away from doing another stock notched vario, is that with a stock un-notched bottom ramp, the bike vibrates a WHOLE lot less. I'm thinking this is the vibration that broke my subframe in south carolina and my header two weekends ago. When I put the notched vario in from Allen - it was night and day smoothness difference. If I can do some ghetto cheap dynamic balancing on the notched vario this winter, I may go ahead and run it. Something tells me this is far harder than I think it is though...
Joe is looking to hook me up with some euro parts this winter, so let's hope that pans out ;)
Really looking forward to disk brakes, new notched vario and some smokies trips in the spring.... Can't wait!
Also, brownie turns 30 soon! Gonna have to do a history on him during winter break to let people know how special he is... My mom just found a bunch of paper work pertaining to him, so it should be an interesting write up looking at documentation I've never seen before :)
