I bought my wife this Vespa LX150 almost two years ago. She has ridden it once. She claims to love it, and has all sorts of excuses for not actually riding it. Whatever.
She also will not let me ride it. I don’t really care about that, because I much prefer my scooters anyways. The Vespa is a very good piece of machinery, but my Yamaha and my Hooligan are more my style.
I decided the best course of action is to service it, ride it enough to get the old gas out of it (wife will not be pleased about this, but will begrudgingly accept it), then fill it up with fresh stabilized premium. After that, if it still has gas in it in a year ($5 says it will, but I’d love to be wrong), I’ll ride it enough to get that gas out of it. Repeat.
So I ordered an oil filter, which this scooter surprisingly has (they usually don’t), and sourced a quart of the required 10-40 synthetic (the Italian scooter will have to slum it with Yamalube coursing through its veins).
Now here’s the fun part. The filter and drain plug are behind the exhaust. Marvelous packaging guys!
Some research on the good old interwebs led me to three possible solutions:
1. Drop the exhaust
2. Buy an oil extractor and suck it out of the fill hole. I believe this is what our own Immoral Minority does.
3. Cut a 24mm wrench down short enough to fit between the plug and the ground, and reach under and around the exhaust.
I chose option three, and ordered the cheapest 24mm combination wrench Amazon had to offer. Here it is in all its Chinese spray painted black for some reason glory.
I would have been upset at the shoddy finish, but since I was about to do this to it, I let it ride.
There was just one problem. There wasn’t any room to actually turn the wrench. It just jammed itself into the side of the oil filter. So, I had to pull the filter before I drained the oil.
Once I did that, I was still unable to crack the drain plug loose. Whatever jack-wagon did this job last, cranked it way too tight. The good news was, with the filter out of the way, I had enough room to get my regular uncut 24mm box wrench in there. That gave me enough leverage to get the plug loose. Turns out, I hadn’t needed to cut a wrench down after all. The internet lied ... I know, I’m shocked too.
From there it was pretty straightforward. Like a car’s oil change, but tiny. It will definitely be a lot easier next time around.
The scooter now has fresh oil, I threw the trickle charger on it to make sure it still had juice, and it did. I checked the tires, and has to throw some air in the front. It's ready to rock now.