I thought I would put something down on my first month or so of Skorpion ownership. The bike is a 2002 Traveller with 12,000 miles on it and appeared to be very clean and tidy, the only issue being duff rear wheel bearings and no MOT. I trailered it back home and squeezed it in the garage alongside the trailer tent, where it stayed for a few days.
I was determined that ,unlike previous bikes I was not going to pull this one to bits. I needed to pull the rear wheel out to sort the bearings and once I'd done this I thought it was probably worth checking the suspension bushes. It all came apart smoothly and the bearings were all in good nick. Then looking at the swinging-arm a big section of the powder coating had flaked off, I thought about hammeriting but the weather was crap, so I pulled the bearings and sent it off for powder coating. At this point I realised I had done exactly what I tried not to do. Never mind.
Whilst the swinging-arm is away I thought I'd fit the rack I'd bought of Ebay for the SRX, this came with a Hepco and Becker top-box which would match the panniers. The brackets took several attempts and a number of evenings to finish, but they look fairly tidy.
That done I thought I would pull the tank so I could plumb in the Scottoiler, I found an easy point to plumb into, put the tank back on and turned the petrol on only to find it pouring out of the carb, ok carb out (pain in the neck) to find some grit in the float valve, so it could have been worse. However on reassembly the float bowl seal would not fit anymore, so I had to leave it overnight so it would go back into shape.
Meanwhile I thought I would fix the oil leak, the oil is drained by removing the oil tank pipe from the engine, and it looked like this seal was leaking. I thought I could just whip the pipe of drop a new 'o' ring in and job done, nope oil seal wouldn't come out and most of the oil went down my sleeve. Oh well it could probably have done with an oil change anyway.
So far my feelings are that whilst the Mz seems to be well put together there are some areas like the air box and wiring that indicate it origins. They are not disastrous but you can tell it wasn't designed in Japan.
Now just need to get the battery charged and an MOT.
