You would not believe the amount of trouble we have with customers who have hired a motorcycle mechanic to install their parts. Of the number of customers who need to reorder a cylinder because of seizure, I believe a realistic estimate of the percentage that had a motorcycle mechanic do the installation is somewhere around 80%. I believe there are a few reasons for this:

1. Most motorcycle mechanics have very little experience with small engines. Two-stroke, small engine scooters require a good deal of specialized knowledge in order to get them tuned properly. None the of things one must know are especially difficult, just different than motorcycles.

2. Customers who don't know what they are doing typically know they don't know what they are doing and so read our how-tos and forum, and ask a lot of questions before they attempt an installation. Paranoia is a lot more useful than confidence when it comes to not blowing up a cylinder. 

With that being said, not all motorcycle mechanics should be avoided. But, if you are going to have a motorcycle mechanic do an installation, I would check on his small engine experience before enlisting his help. It will save you a lot of time, money, and frustration. Don't say you haven't been warned ;)

So I was cruising the web earlier today, trying to find some info about the Vino 50 4t. Through my web surfing, jumping from page to page, I ended up on the Yamaha corporate website. Everything was in japanese, so i didn't know what I was doing or what I was clicking on. Finally I found a link to get me to the english version. Once there, I didn't find what I was looking for but I did find something else - Paper Craft.

Yamaha has this section dedicated to all these little paper projects that you can download. Its like legit origomi. I looked at their selection of projects and they had just about every motorsport vehicle they make represented. However, not much of a showing in the scooter world other than the Tmax. It looks pretty fun, I will probably give it a try if i ever get a free minute. 

So for all those that are interested out there, I thought I would share the link so you could go download the files and build your own Yamaha Tmax.

For those that give is a whirl post up some pics in the forum. 

Yamaha Tmax Paper Craft

In a continual effort to keep in touch with our customers and fellow scooter enthusiasts, Provoscooter is now on Twitter. It's been a few months since we set up the account, but we now have someone to manage it for us. Twitter is a great way to get the latest info about what we are up to. When we get an inventory shipment in...we will tweet about it. When we add new parts to the shop...we will update you on twitter. When we make changes to the site/forum...we will send out a tweet to let the world know. And probably the most important, when we have a sale (or even a special twitter followers sale)...we will let you know via twitter.

Twitter is a great way for us to keep everyone up to date about what we are doing. This past year has seen a lot of changes at provoscooter. Posting updates on twitter will help you keep track of everything that is going on. So make sure you stay in the loop and follow us on twitter.

There have been a number of requests for the service manuals that were once a main part of the Provoscooter homepage. They have since been moved to the Wiki. We haven't had time to organize the Wiki and start putting in our own content but i've posted some service manuals there for download. Feel free to create an atricle or write a definition if you like, but we'll provide more guidance on the Wiki in the future.

Service Manuals

I thought i should spread the word about all of the forum updates that we have made in the last few weeks. We now have a fully functional garage, a brand-new theme, and a whole host of new features that you can only get all at one time by waiting 4 years to update. If you haven't been to the forum lately, you should check it out.