Author Topic: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED  (Read 26723 times)

Stig / Major Tom

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #45 on: May 14, 2024, 07:53:36 PM »
Sean, I've started a service ticket with the folks who wrote the KymcoUSA service manual - explaining your situation, incl what you've tried.
If they offer any tips I'll let you know.

Stig

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Neil955i

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #46 on: May 15, 2024, 07:01:51 AM »
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....


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

Stig

You do know I’m over 100 miles from the nearest sea Stig?!  Open to offers mind 😉

I should imagine the answer to that question would be “very carefully” down the gang plank?
Regards & ride safe,
Neil

Current garage:  Kymco DTX360 & Triumph Street Triple 675R
Past bikes: BSA C15. Honda S/wing (GL500). Kawasaki GPz750. BMW K100RS. Kawasaki GPZ900R. Yamaha FJ1200 x2. Sprint. Triumph Daytona 900. Kawasaki ZX-7R. T595 Daytona. Kawasaki ZX-9R x2. Triumph Daytona 955i. X-Town

Stig / Major Tom

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #47 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...

Good luck,
Stig
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slwelsh

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #48 on: May 16, 2024, 02:52:12 AM »
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
« Last Edit: May 16, 2024, 03:00:16 AM by slwelsh »
-Sean
2017 Like 200i

slwelsh

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #49 on: May 16, 2024, 02:58:44 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
-Sean
2017 Like 200i

slwelsh

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #50 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
-Sean
2017 Like 200i

Neil955i

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #51 on: June 10, 2024, 11:43:33 AM »
Sean your perseverance does you credit!  I'm impressed with your tenacity and glad that you got the right result - I'm sure some or all of those tips will be used by others in a similar fix.  Incidentally loved the freezer / heat gun hack!  Way to go.
Regards & ride safe,
Neil

Current garage:  Kymco DTX360 & Triumph Street Triple 675R
Past bikes: BSA C15. Honda S/wing (GL500). Kawasaki GPz750. BMW K100RS. Kawasaki GPZ900R. Yamaha FJ1200 x2. Sprint. Triumph Daytona 900. Kawasaki ZX-7R. T595 Daytona. Kawasaki ZX-9R x2. Triumph Daytona 955i. X-Town

Stig / Major Tom

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #52 on: June 10, 2024, 07:59:35 PM »
I am impressed Sean!
I figured another Kymco DIY'er had done himself a mischief - or had simply paled in the face of bloody reason and tossed it overboard!

Two things:
Are you a writer by trade - before you became a pirate? We don't often see such writing on this forum....or any forum for that matter.
Two - Neil may just be right that your post will be of great assistance to any owner facing the same issue - or, or....the poor soul my read through your experience and save his marriage, or the cat cowering over there....and choose to make an anchor of his LIKE. And we could not fault him for doing so!

My goodness. The Kymco tech was correct only in that it will come off!
I wondered if you took this on only because you had become becalmed? But no - you have a motor boat.

Anyway, great work Sean. We've had members who had corrosion issues when living near the ocean (I see lots of that when we vaca in St Pete Beach) .....but your poor scooters live on the ocean!

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.

Well done Sean!

Stig

Sad scary to see what the salt air is doing to the metal!
« Last Edit: June 10, 2024, 08:18:21 PM by Stig / Major Tom »
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slwelsh

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #53 on: June 11, 2024, 03:50:24 AM »
...
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.

« Last Edit: June 11, 2024, 03:52:25 AM by slwelsh »
-Sean
2017 Like 200i

Stig / Major Tom

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #54 on: June 11, 2024, 02:17:56 PM »
Thanks for that Sean!

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!
(When I was a young dumb student in the 1960's I spent the night with Parisian Gendarmes. The subject was a motorbike, a train station and correct ownership. My 97 yr old mother still remembers every bit of my crime - and shares it with my kids at Xmas dinners. Her point being of course - "you may not be perfect kids - but then neither was your father!")


Anyway - stick around - post pictures of the natives, etc.!

Boat safe!
Stig
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Iahawk

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #55 on: June 11, 2024, 10:00:49 PM »
Sean, what an interesting life you lead! Heck, I post about my silly 40 year old Honda bike and even sillier 28 year old Honda scooter! I wouldn’t mind reading stories about life with a Honda outboard motor. While this is a ‘Kymco scooter forum’ we tend to post a little about everything. Feel free to share pictures and stories about your travels..I’d love to hear about life on board with a scooter as your primary land transportation.
2010 People S200 - sold after 8 wonderful years!
2014 Ninja 300
1996 Honda Helix
1984 Honda Nighthawk 650

slwelsh

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Re: LIKE200i rear wheel removal, REVISED
« Reply #56 on: June 12, 2024, 07:16:55 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).

-Sean
2017 Like 200i

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