goodbye kansas

well on the last day crossing kansas i was hoping to see something a little more interesting but this was not the case, the scooters were running fine and it was all going well and another 300 miler was out of the way.

well the nest day saw us going into missouri and like night and day withing 50 miles of entering the scenery changed into rolling country sid, it was at about 3/4 the way through that roy said theres something wrong with my clutch, so we stopped and after i had a look i though that the clutch needed adjustment and that the cable had mearly slipped.

well were were only one hour from a scoot shop that was to be our destination at the end of the day, so after trying all external measure to reradjust roys clutch, it was decided to press on to there workshop and look there.

well to cut along story short, once we got to the scooter shop, lifted the scooter removed the clutch, it was there that we discoverd that the spring in the center of the pressure plate had somehow come lose and dissapeared completely, but not untill it had split the clutch hub center,which had then jammed, tearing the wodruff key from the slot and finally damaging roys auto lube gears!

oh and i could not find the spring!

so after much discussion with the others there in the know, plus seeing what parts were available for a vintage scooter at a modern scooter shop, which were slim to none, we needed a new clutch at the bare minimum. so we managed to locate one on a local home mechanic named robert , who said we could have one out of his shop lonerfor replacement value.

so off we went in search of roberts house, where he removed the clutch, talk about robbing peter to pay paul.

then it was back to the shop to jb weld[glue] in the woodruff key in the crankshaft, so after a lot of messing about it was finally glued in and set up enough to install the new clutch, which was half roys old one and half of the

new one. it went ok after a lont of persuading as the crank was a mess and no longer up for a nice new clutch.

the clutch was toqued up to its max plus some more so that the nut would take the load and not the woodruff key. this was good as it was going to get asit was now well past ten, i was falling asleep in vespa st louis shop , while robert was going back and forward to his house robbing all the bits we needed to get it roilling , in the end robert put in the clutch and got it all tightened up while i changed my oil.

which was well over due as i now have an aditional 7 thousand kilometers on my scooter from when we started and were were still no where near being there yet.

in the resturant i fell asleep, like really gone, waiting for my meal, after this finally i was in bed and roys scooter seemed to be going ok , even though the idle was a little high id rectify that in the morning.

well the next day was to be 412 miles in one day! and roy had a glued in clutch, when i tried to set the idle it was pretty obvious that there was some damage to the oil seal and that the idle was to be zero or about 2000 rpm…ouch.

so roy managed to nurse this scooter for 412 miles banging it into gear at the red light and working really hard to try not to destroy it some more.

it only has 2.5 more days to go to complete the cannonball.

on this day we decided to stay with kieran on the lambretta as roys bike would well to maintain the 45/50 mph that kieran was doing, also there was about 90 miles of freeway, to get us out of st louis missori and the two slower bikes would stand a much greater chance of survival if they stuck together, well talk about suiside, holy cow, it took all my strengh not to gun it off at 65 every time a semi truck came up behind us and finally slowed down to 45 mph, trust me they were not impressed, at one point , a car and a trailer/caravan pulled on to the freeway and managed to force his way between kieran and roy, so roy pulled over in to the shoulder and slowed down, kieran on the lambretta gunned it and tried to slowly overtake then, so they were moving in a circle around this old boy on the freeway and they couldnt see each other, then when kieran finally got in front roy was not there, roy finally realising what was going un gunned it to get bck to kieran and overtook the car/trailer on the shoulder, talk about comerdy of errors, i was laughing so had i could hardly ride.

once we got off the freeway and back on to the slowe road we soon started banging away the miles at 45 mph!

but i will say this there were quite a few streatchs of road where following cars simply could not get by as it was to twisty,on one point when we pulled over to faster vehicles go by, i counted 28 cars and at least 5 trucks, there were quite a few people that we pissed off today.

14 hours later and 4 states[misouri, illinio, indiana, ohio] we arrived in cincinatii!

so here we are, roys scotter does not sound well but is running fine, kierans scooter is very painfully slow, [your on your own tomoz m8] and my small end bearing is chattering under full loads, hardly suprising after 2 cannonballs!