A shot of a PX carburetor courtesy of Scootin Old Skool.

Lately my PX has been having a tough time starting, even warm, with more than a few kicks and the choke full-out to get the beast purring. There are a number of possible reasons for this, but a typical culprit is the carburetor.

With half of the carburetor’s job being to clean crap from the air and fuel before they mix, it’s a place that needs to be inspected from time to time for crud build up and with a 25 year old gas tank on the bike, and after a winter of storage (even with fuel stabilizer in the tank) there’s a good chance that the carburetor jets are gummed up or the filters are crudded up.

Fortunately, cleaning the carb is a relatively easy task, particularly when there are fantastic guides out there on the web for vintage scooters:

Large-frame Vespa
In my case, with a large-frame P-series, as always, Richard Hoar’s excellent go-to resource VespaMaintenance.com provides the answer. Richard has a step-by-step article on carburetor cleaning and rebuilding with excellent detailed photos every step of the way.

Small-frames Vespas
For Vespa small frames, there’s really only one site you need to know on the web: Niall King’s Vespa Small Frames site which contains a wealth of fantastic smallie maintenance, including a step-by-step carburetor rebuild. Like Richard, Niall makes our lives easier with a full photographic step-by-step of the process.

Lambrettas
When it comes to Lammys, my go to site is the Lambretta Club of Great Britain. The Brits frankly just have the knowledge-edge on these scoots compared to us Yankees, with seemingly a Series III sitting in every other garden shed.

Again, the LCGB has a nicely broken down carb inspection, cleaning and rebuild with photographs along the way.

UPDATE:
I did get a chance to take a look inside the carb this weekend, in part because minutes before my bike stalled at a light and took some serious kicking to get it back running. The fuel filter was clean and the jets looked pretty good, but I ran a thin guitar string through them (an old scooterist’s trick) to clean them out. I also remove the air filter and cleaned it in fresh gasoline. The whole thing took less than half-an-hour and now the bike starts on the first or second kick. Much improved.

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