2006 Bajaj Chetak Project - An Intro

I know this is maybe a little left field, but I want to start documenting work on my old scooter.

There are two reasons for this:

1. It's kind of fun to force yourself to document and take pictures of things you're working on. It's also a good way to work on technical writing.
2. This particular scooter is something that a lot of the documentation no longer exists. I hope that by doing this I'm putting something out into the world that helps keep these things alive down the road.

I won't send this out in email or anything, but I hope that this information can live on so people can access it down the road. I have a feeling that there will be more of these popping up in the not too distant future.

Some Background

I was first introduced to scooters in my sophomore year of high school. A couple of the guys I ran around with had some older Yamaha scooters that we would mob around on and cause all kinds of trouble.

In 2003, I bought my own. A Yamaha Vino that I eventually would put an exhaust and all kinds of weird stuff on.

I've owned a scooter of one type or another ever since.

About This Scooter

The story about the Bajaj Chetak being in America is kind of a weird one.

In the 60's, Vespa licensed their scooters to be made in India and sold under their name. In the early 70's, the license expired and the companies were left with all of the tooling to make a "Vespa" scooter without the name. So naturally, they did just that.

From there, you get decades and decades of scooters being made that are almost identical to what was being produced in Italy, but slightly less expensive. It also made a way to get parts for those scooters. In the early 2000's, the scooters started making their way to the US in small amounts through small dealers around the country.

The first time I saw one of these scooters was at a place in Provo. They had the regular scooters as well as some tuktuks made by Bajaj. The idea of a manual transmission scooter that wasn't crazy expensive was mind blowing. Around 2008 I would end up buying a Genuine Stella, which was another Indian made holdover rebranded for the US.

I believe 2006 was the last year that these scooters were sold in the US. They also stopped production in India at that time and would bring back the Chetak name in 2019 as an electric scooter.

About My Scooter

Mine is a 2006 Bajaj Chetak that I picked up in 2022 from a lady on Facebook Marketplace. It had belonged to her brother and she had tried to ride it and said it was too fast for her. I did a quick spin around the block and decided to take it home. Based on the stickers, I am willing to guess it was bought from the same scooter shop in Provo and made it's way north to Idaho at some point.

I rode it quite a bit through the summer of 2022 and then had a pretty brutal elbow surgery the winter of 2023 that made it so I struggled to ride anything with handlebars. After that, I started coaching closer to full time and it was difficult to ride it too much because I always needed to be able to carry soccer balls and whatnot.

Now that gas prices are up to almost $5 a gallon and I'm really only coaching in the fall at a high school that has storage for all of my stuff, I think it's time that I get this back on the road as my daily runabout. It's also just fun as heck to ride.

What's Next?

It has a couple of issues. Issues it had when I bought it and then issues that have developed over the last couple years of it sitting around. I'm going to tackle those in smaller chunks to break down the process and the whys. I think that's a better way to do things.

So first I need to get it running. Guess I better go outside.