Vehicles & Servicing Best Posts in Thread: Scooter Overheating

All standard Mios are air cooled - mine is. Not sure which, if any model is liquid cooled. It's fully automatic, so you cannot change gear selectively.

 

There are three things used to help cool engines, it's either air, coolant or oil.

I'm not aware of any vehicle where oil is solely used, although it could be I guess, but to my knowledge it is only to supplement air or fluid cooling. Oil also serves as a lubricant, so it it's not circulating it can cause heat to build up due to friction. I doubt the scooted has an oil cooler. Check your oil level. If oil isn't lubricating you can cause lots of damage to the engine. I'd guess a scooter is gravity fed.

Air is pretty straight forward, either it is the normal flow of the air caused by movement or forced by a fan. If you don't have liquid cooling, clean the cooling fins, maybe caked in mud and verify someone didn't get creative and cover the cooling fins, typically on the head. Other than the fan failing or something impending the flow of air it's a very reliable system.

It sounds like this scooter may have a fluid cooling system based on a previous post. Coolant is typically routed through a radiator to transfer the heat to the air to cool the fluid. Things to check here would be the fan, if it not just cooled by air flow over the radiator. That the radiator is clear of debris. Many fluid coolant systems have thermostats to regulate the temperature of the engine. In cars, they occasionally need to be replaced, so check the thermostat if it has one. In addition, there is also a water pump to circulate the fluid through the system, so verify your pump is working. Check for clear airflow over the radiator. Lastly, make sure you are using a good cooling fluid mix of water and coolant.

If you have to get into the engine (heads/cyclinders/valves), serious damage has probably already been done.