JJScoot wrote: Ill take a look at the plug- I dont want caramel anymore or do I? And then if that looks ok Ill go from there.
A mocha or caramel-colored plug is good. Ashy white indicates too lean, damp and black is too rich. Check the plug at idle and at various throttle settings. If you run it up to speed, hit the kill switch and coast to a stop, then pull and check the plug...if you let it come back to idle, you'll get a false plug reading for high throttle.
JJScoot wrote:Other than pulling off the snorkel, I dont want to do anything else to it. I checked my sliders and a few of them had a couple of worn down spots, but nothing terrible. I cleaned the variator and replaced them with some I had. I also have a yellow contra spring that I have never put in, I might try that out this weekend too. will it take mph off my top end?
Hard to say what the spring rating is without knowing the vendor. Different vendors use different color codes to identify the spring rating. If you can tell us what brand it is or where you bought it, we can determine if it's suitable.
At any rate, a stiffer contra spring alters the engine speed at which the transmission variates. Stiffer springs need more engine speed to be compressed. One pitfall is that just changing the spring can improve acceleration at the cost of top speed. In addition to higher revs, you may consider using heavier rollers to help overcome the spring and get the variator to actuate fully. Getting this to work well can sometimes tale a bit of fiddling, but I'll share a trick I found to guide the tuning.
Generally for a stock motor, I recommend going with the lowest level performance spring and adding rollers that are one gram heavier than stock. You can always mix three stock and three of the heavier rollers to create a smaller overall weight change. The ideal net gain is a bit sharper acceleration, as the variator stays in "low gear" longer, with the extra weight helping to mitigate the loss of top speed.
For really dialing it in, a cheap solution is to use a smartphone with a cycling app that can track and graph speed over time. I used to use My Tracks for Android, but it's n longer available. Whichever app you use, make sure it can record a ride and display a speed over time graph.
Get on your scoot, start a log with the app and accelerate from zero to top speed. Pull over and stop logging, then review the graph. When you look at the acceleration curve (speed over time), there's generally a dip in speed when the transmission variates. This data will help you dial in your transmission.
You can lighten the rollers to minimize the dip in the aceleration curve. If you have no dip, you can add weight to improve top speed, just make small changes until you start to see a small plateau in your acceleration curve.
Good luck with the tuning and share your findings, it's a bit of work but it'll be worth it when the scoot just accelerates cleanly from idle to WOT.