When I bought my PK the only flaw was that the lights had mysteriously stopped working (2 weeks after the MOT). This meant that for the first week of riding, I could only do so before the night fell- and we were fast approaching the clocks going back, which meant I had about 15 minutes to get back from work before I was getting honked and flashed at. So the first phase of maintaining
Penelope was to get her shining bright.
So we decided to open her up to find out what was going on. I gave her a little oiling in places while I was there, too.
We got inside her to figure out what was up; after a fiddle and a few tests, we came to the conclusion that it was the
regulator that had, well, stopped regulating. This basically meant that the bulbs couldn’t handle the amount of power going in to them, therefore causing all of them to blow.
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| Out with the old, in with the new |
We had to replace all of the bulbs on the scooter, which cost about £15 in total. At first we replaced the bulbs like-for-like, but realised that whoever put them in before us didn’t get the correct bulbs for all of them.
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| A handful of the old bulbs |
My old man downloaded this
diagram for the wiring on a PK to find that
it was all a bit mixed up. So we decided to start from the beginning- we
re-wired and replaced with the correct bulbs eventually!
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| Vespa PK Wiring Diagram |
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| The old man getting stuck in - not too sure about the sandals & socks |
I've got to admit, I'm glad I've got my Dad there for little things like this. I managed to learn a fair bit helping him with the wires, but if I had to do all this myself I’d probably have blown up the garage.
After a total of an hour or two working on the electrics, we had light!
