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Messages - slwelsh

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1
LIKE 200i / Re: Kymco LIKE200i belt clutch & Dr Pulley DIY
« on: February 24, 2026, 03:27:19 PM »
Quote from: TBR125 on May 14, 2020, 02:13:12 AM
... Does the like 200 not have sufficient room to slip the belt over the clutch and then the drive pulley? ...

Coming here to say that, yes, you can get a belt off and on without pulling the clutch, but it's a tight fit between the clutch and the edge of the cavity. You need to worry it out/in, turning the clutch by hand as you go. BTDT (I had no desire to open the clutch when I recently had to replace the roller weights.)


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LIKE 200i / Re: Roller weights and belt replacement to fix "clutch grabbiness" issue
« on: February 24, 2026, 02:27:39 PM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on February 19, 2026, 05:15:33 PM
... How many miles on your LIKE? ...and the belt and rollers?

4k miles, and the rollers and belt were original.

Quote
Great photos! could we get some of your scooter and your riding areas?

Thanks.

As a reminder, I'm the guy who lives on a boat and thus had so much trouble removing a wheel for a tire replacement (thread here: https://www.kymcoforum.com/index.php?topic=24124.msg239421#msg239421
). So my riding area is the entire eastern half of the US within a few miles of the water, and we've also ridden them in Canada, the Bahamas, and the Turks & Caicos. Before the boat we lived in a bus with a "garage" underneath, and that riding area included all 48 of the continental US states and six states in Mexico; back then I had a People 150.

Here is a photo I happen to like, taken on a day we were moving between AirBnBs while we had to be off the boat for painting. The AirBnBs had no comfortable seating and we brought the deck chairs from the boat. Three decades of life on two wheels has equipped us to move *anything* that way. This was two years ago and I have since removed the racing stripes, which were peeling up. And my wife has ditched that Buddy for a Sym Cabo.



I'm afraid I only come to this forum when I have a problem. Either for help, as when I posted about the wheel troubles, or to share my experience as I am doing here. And of late the forum has not been cooperating; I got an email notice of replies to this thread but I've gotten nothing but database syntax errors for days trying to get back on.


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LIKE 200i / Roller weights and belt replacement to fix "clutch grabbiness" issue
« on: February 19, 2026, 04:01:39 AM »
Apologies if this duplicates posts by others; I confess I did not go back through the whole archive.

Lately my scoot has been rough off the starting line, with the clutch grabbing somewhat violently a couple of times before getting moving. Worse at low rpm; I had to grab a handful to get going without drama. The best way I can describe the feel was like being in the car with a teenager learning to drive a stick. I mentioned this to a buddy who used to own a Vespa dealership and he told me my roller weights had flat spots. He also told me that as long as I was replacing the weights I should put a new belt on.

Today I spent a good three hours wrestling with the tupperware and the fasteners around the air filter and the drive case. Splitting the case involved a mallet and a pry bar as the gasket had fused to both sides of the case. And once inside I needed a decent impact driver to remove the variator nut.

Sure enough, the rollers had assymetric wear, aka "flat spots." Visible but subtle in appearance, but immediately evident when rolling them on a flat surface.



The ramps on the inside of the variator had corresponding wear marks showing the weights had been sliding in places and not rolling.



As suggested, I also replaced the belt, which hardly looked worn. Slightly different part number, with the difference being, I think, some Kevlar.



Buttoned it all back up, losing only one locking tab on the fenderr skirt, and sure enough, the problem went away entirely. I've been noticing some loss of top speed lately, too, and I am hoping that, too, will have improved, but I'm in Key West atm and I can't really get it up to full speed here.

Anyway, I hope someone finds this useful.

4
For Sale / Like 200i (maybe others?) windscreens, free to good home (pay shipping)
« on: September 24, 2024, 04:24:40 PM »
I have three Kymco windscreens for a Like 200i, but, sadly, I do not have the mounting hardware to actually mount any of them to my 200i -- the hardware, along with yet another windscreen, was firmly attached to my last 200i, which was stolen. I have not bothered to look these up to see if they fit other models.

I've been carrying these around for years, thinking "some day I am going to rig up some kind of mount for my current Like," but the time has come to admit I'm never going to get around to it. Without the hardware they have no real market value, but I'd rather not just bin them.

Two full-height and one shorty. One of the full-height is still in the factory shrink wrap. The other two screens are used and show normal wear including some scuffs, but generally good condition. The two full-height are clear; the shorty is a dark mirrored blue (it's well below your line of sight.)

They're yours for the cost of shipping from Mamaroneck, NY via UPS ground. You can either send me a UPS label, or PayPal me the money and I'll do it. Also, you have to take all three; I have but one box, and I'm not going through this again. If they're not spoken for by the time I leave Mamaroneck this weekend, they are going to the dump.



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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: June 12, 2024, 07:16:55 PM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on June 11, 2024, 02:17:56 PM
One of my interests is art forgeries and art theft - so I'd enjoy reading your writings about the theft of your LIKE and People!

Well, since you asked.

My beloved People 150, mint green with chocolate brown handgrips and thus named "Chip," was stolen from a marina in Charelston while I myself was away, deployed by the American Red Cross to St. Thomas for a hurricane relief operation:
https://ourodyssey.blogspot.com/2017/10/grief-and-relief.html

My first Like 200i, purchased to replace the People and involving a long drive in a rental pickup. It was a deep cobalt blue and thus named "Midnight."
https://ourodyssey.blogspot.com/2018/02/first-world-yacht-problems.html

The same guy who stole that bike, by virtue of having absconded with my wife's keyring, returned to steal her Vino 125 a year later, having kept the keys all that time:
https://ourodyssey.blogspot.com/2019/04/purloin-quarters.html

The two Kymcos have never been seen again, police reports notwithstanding. The Vino showed up abandoned at an airport, and we ended up with a towing bill to add insult to injury (it was unsalvageable).


6
LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: June 11, 2024, 03:50:24 AM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on June 10, 2024, 07:59:35 PM
...
Two things:
Are you a writer by trade - before you became a pirate? ...

Two - Neil may just be right that your post will be of great assistance to any owner facing the same issue ...
...
I wondered if you took this on only because you had become becalmed? But no - you have a motor boat.
...

ACF-50 is supposed to help with corrosion on motorbikes and such - but your situation would be a real test!

Digging tires off and back onto rims?.....No way - ...not since I was 12 and I had no other choice! That's why God made dealerships.
...

I am not a writer by trade, apart from incidental to my career in telecom/computers/networking. It's more of an avocation. I write often; we have, for mostly reasons of our own memory and to keep friends and family apprised of our whereabouts and goings-on, a blog that now goes back two decades in some 2,500+ posts, dating to when we left the world of fixed addresses for a nomadic lifestyle. I'm very wordy, so I am not going to suggest you read it. But if you ask me when my last Like 200i was stolen, or the People 150 before that, I will go back to my own blog to get that answer. I could also tell you when and where I last changed a scooter tire (on my wife's Yamaha Vino 125, also since stolen). Or when I discovered that the reason for a slow leak in that tire later was because I had done the change on a grassy area, and a blade of grass was stuck in the bead.

As far as my post helping others, I of course landed on this thread when I was myself searching for any shred of information on this process. So, yes, I do hope Neil is right and anyone in a similar jam will glean something from it.

The reason for taking this on, up to and including wrestling with the tire irons myself, is simple: The logistics of getting the scooter from the boat to a service shop, and then hanging around long enough for them to get to it, and then getting it back aboard, are actually more daunting than just buckling down and doing it myself. The damage happened in the Bahamas, and I discovered it in the middle of Florida, at a time when we could not linger with a hurricane deadline looming.  The Kymco dealer who sold me the tire, reputedly the largest in the nation (Solano Cycles) said three weeks minimum. I'm already in Maryland now -- I could not afford to be just a week north of St. Augustine today.

One of the reasons it took me until yesterday to finish the job is that the same story was playing out with the Honda outboard on our dinghy, which is a far more critical bit of transportation hardware for us, being basically our "family car" if you will. This is the wrong forum, but I made a whole write-up on having to drill out four broken seized bolts from the block after something as simple as needing to replace the thermostat. Here again, at the beginning of summer, outboard shops are backed up a month. Necessity is a mother.

I'll have to look into the ACF-50. I'm using Tef-Gel on hardware as I put it back on (apart from critical torque items like the axle nut and brake bolts), and I have Boeshield as well, but it's a losing battle out here, so I save the spendy chemicals for places where it will do the most good. I though the People 150 and the Yamaha Vino were doing pretty good and still had many years left, even slowly rusting away, but it appears that scooters get stolen before they can age out.

Thanks again for all your help with this; it's great to have this forum as a resource. I don't drop by often (I think my last post was a write-up on putting lamps into the stock turn signal housings), but when I do I always find it helpful.


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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: June 10, 2024, 03:49:51 AM »
I thought I'd come back here now that I'm finally done and post an update, in case it might help someone else. I know it's been nearly four weeks, but boat maintenance and getting the heck out of the hurricane box supervened. The new tire finally got installed today, after hours of fighting with the fork bearing.

What I ended up having to do, since no amount of mechanical effort, penetrating oil, or heat would free the bearing, was to resort to an old mechanics' trick:

First, I pried the seal off the bearing. This is a rubber-over-metal affair that did not come quietly. That revealed the ball bearings in their "cage," which in this case was metal. The two halves of the cage are spot-welded between each pair of balls. I was hoping those welds would yield to prying, but no such luck. I ended up drilling out every single weld. That let me pry out all the bits of metal cage, and with those out of the way, it's possible to move all the balls to one side of the circle. That lets you worry the two races of the bearing apart.



Now I had the fork off, with the outer race firmly seized inside, and the inner race still seized to the shaft. The inner race was easy: I cut nearly all the way through it with a Dremel in two places, and then I was able to break it in half with a large screwdriver and a four-pound engineer hammer. (A cold chisel is a better choice than a screwdriver but I do not have one aboard.)



The outer race was more problematic. With the fork off I was able to apply plenty of heat and lots of PB Blaster, but it would not budge, especially with no way to get a puller in there. Ultimately I had to again use the Dremel, making several cuts, all on a bias due to the way the tool had to be inserted. A few more blows with the hammer and screwdriver broke it into pieces and I was able to pry those out.



Unfortunately, there was no way to cut deep enough into the race without also getting into some of the aluminum of the bearing housing. Once I cleaned out the housing I put the sanding drum on the Dremel and sanded the gouges out as best I could, in the hopes of rounding any straight lines that could later turn into stress cracks spreading across the casting. It's a beefy casting so I am not too worried.





I put the new bearing (NSK from Amazon, $14 for two) in the freezer for a few hours and I heated the fork casting with my heat gun and it dropped right in. I needed to clean up the shaft with some fine emery cloth, "shoe shine" style, to get it to slide onto the shaft. The rest of the job went smoothly, although anyone who has done it will tell you that it's a bear to get a scooter tire off/on a rim, and to get the tire to bead with just an air compressor. I won't be able to test my work until we are at a dock someplace, which may be a few weeks away.

-Sean

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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: May 16, 2024, 02:58:44 AM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on May 15, 2024, 09:14:10 AM
From Kymco tech support...
"Yeah, no more special tricks beyond what you have tried other than combining the methods along with rubber mallet tapping here and there. What will get it done is persistence, just keep trying and it will come loose. If possible you can lean the machine over to help the lubricant get in there, pay attention to the position of the rear fork and work it from multiple angles as it can get bound up."

Persistence.....sometimes the hardest tool to find...

Thank you so much for following up with this.

The whole shebang is still sitting up there on the boat deck untouched, albeit with the new tire supporting the muffler to keep it off the deck paint. After last I posted here, a whole bunch of other things supervened -- we've moved the boat three times since then, and been on a long shopping and mail-retrieval trip aided by serendipitous friends with a car. Normally, the Like would have done the mail-retrieval and shopping duty. Oh, and I had to transit to an Amazon locker to pick up the new bearings, NSK models. By the time I am done with the heat and the, umm, persistence, the one that's in there now will be toast.

-Sean

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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: May 16, 2024, 02:52:12 AM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on May 14, 2024, 02:35:12 PM
Nice boat!
If you need any deck hands - I just finished the Pirates of the Caribbean series - and Neil - he must be a sailor, living on an island as he does - has seen Master and Commander twice!
We'll just need to discuss paid leave and health insurance....

So, you are out of Bear, Delaware?

Lol, we get lots of crew offers. It sounds great until you hear the hours and the actual work.

Bear was just a "port of convenience" when we named the boat (a hailing port is a legal requirement for naming a documented vessel). At that point in time we'd already been living several years in an RV and had no fixed home to speak of, and the last place we lived in a fixed dwelling for any length of time was the SF Bay Area. We could have chosen San Jose, CA as our hailing port, but since we bought the boat on the east coast, we figured that would lead to too many "so, did you bring it through the canal?" type questions. Neither of us was partial to any of the places either one of us had lived on the east coast, and so we ended up just picking one. We titled the dinghy out of Delaware for fiscal reasons, and so we just picked Delaware for the big boat, too. "Bear" was the shortest seaport name in the state.

Quote
My daughter wanted to see the Atlantic - and Delaware was a straight shot over - so we went to Lewes, DE last summer. Took the pup. (we won't be going back to Florida until the dog expires....she doesn't now that - I hate putting her in the kennel - the dog, not the daughter)

a question: How do you get the 260lb scooter off of the boat?

There is a davit crane on the boat deck, port side aft, that exists to lower and raise the dinghy. It's an 800-lb crane and we had, at one time, a ~600lb dinghy (we switched from a fiberglass model to an aluminum one, dropping that to ~400). So the scoots are nbd for the crane. We use Canyon Dancer bar restraints to strap them in their deck chocks, and the Canyon Dancer becomes part of the lifting tackle. I replaced the bolts for the rear grab bar with eye bolts for the other end of the harness. Obviously, we have to be at a dock. port-side-to, to offload.

-Sean

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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: May 13, 2024, 11:20:17 PM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on May 13, 2024, 10:04:45 PM
That ain't Topeka....where we at here Sean?
Florida,  Bahamas ,  Da Nang?
Nice boat, BTW!

Anchored off the beach at Egg Island, near Spanish Wells in the Bahamas. Taken by another cruiser in the anchorage last month. The flat tire is from a fish hook I picked up riding around Great Harbour Cay. And, thank you. It is our only home.

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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: May 13, 2024, 08:33:09 PM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on May 13, 2024, 07:50:52 PM
...
Good luck - would love to see a photo of where your scooters live!


I probably should get a better shot from on deck, but it's raining ATM so you'll have to just zoom in on this one instead. In this shot the Buddy is in front of and partly obscuring the Like.

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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: May 13, 2024, 06:10:22 PM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on May 13, 2024, 05:56:16 PM
(Sean - some of us use postimages.org to host and load photos here.)

Darn - "on a boat" ? Saltwater, or ?
...
Heat is obviously cooking the bearing - which - judging by your troubles is already shot. So would be replaced in any event.


Yes, the boat lives mostly in salt water. Which is why this is a used Kymco and not, say, a Vespa on the deck. We actually have two -- the other is a Buddy 125. They're stowed on the boat deck, which is around 10' or so above the water, so they don't see any salt spray, but get plenty of salt air. I'm on my third Kymco in a decade; the first two (People 150 and another Like 200i) were both stolen, so they don't seem to last long enough to rust away.

I've got a new bearing on the way, NSK 6203DDU (seals on both sides, rather than just one). So I'm going to try even more heat, and I guess if that does not work I can pull the cage out of the race, worry the balls out, and get the fork off that way. Then I can cut the inner race off the shaft.

Thanks for your help. Further suggestions from anyone are welcome.

-Sean

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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: May 13, 2024, 03:22:12 PM »
Quote from: Stig / Major Tom on May 13, 2024, 01:38:54 AM
... but I think that fork casting is pretty stout! ...

This area of your scooter seems unusually stubborn!
...
I've no other trick for this to release from the axle. Some lubricant, and try every 24 hrs with your puller. Tap tap with the wood.

Thanks for your insight. I went ahead and put a lot more pressure on the puller -- to the point where I am galling the threads of the puller. No luck. Pictured is the current state of affairs. Yes, I know my shocks are rusty. The scooter lives on a boat. That's probably the reason the bearing is seized to the shaft.

-Sean



Hmm. I tried to include a photo but the img tag does not seem to be working.

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LIKE 200i / Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« on: May 13, 2024, 12:51:16 AM »
OK, I know this is an old thread, but it seems the best place to ask:

I'm stuck at the step where the rear fork is supposed to be removed. It appears the inner race is seized to the shaft. I've tried WD40/PB Blaster and heat along with a three-jaw puller. I'm afraid to put more force on the puller because I don't want to break the casting. I see in the notes that Stig needed a 2-jaw puller and I am wondering if that was for this purpose?

Recommendations welcome.

BTW, I did need to use PB Blaster, heat, and a 3/8 air impact wrench to free the axle bolt.

-Sean

15
LIKE 200i / Re: Aux turn signals in the stock housings
« on: February 14, 2019, 03:14:28 AM »
Quote from: Stig on February 13, 2019, 11:33:15 PM
...
I wonder - for us "reading with comprehension" challenged people - do you have more photos of the steps you took to install the lights in the blanked light housings in the LIKE?

Those were all the shots I got during the project. There's really not too much to those little covers; the trick was figuring out that a mini bi-pin (G4) lamp holder is a perfect fit inside them. So really just two steps to that part -- drill a hole, and glue the holder in place. Next time I have the fairing open I can try to get a pic of the wiring.


Quote
Also, would some LEDs in the stock (US) turn pods also be a benefit? Would need an adapter to deal with fast blinking, but...

I think the drop-in replacement LEDs nowadays are much better than stock lamps, especially on scooters. The incandescent scooter bulbs are all lower-power versions of automotive bulbs due to the anemic alternators on these motors. By going to LED you can get a lot more light output and actually reduce the power budget.

I have not cross-referenced those bulbs so I am not sure which LEDs you need but I am sure they're out there. The flasher is a big question mark; if it's electronic it will probably be fine but the old standard thermal ones depend on a certain load which the LEDs can't supply. There are aftermarket LED-compatible flashers, too, but I don't know how much effort it would be to retrofit. I might look into it because I would like to change the rear blinkers out for brighter LEDs, too.


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