Stella had her first hiccup last week.  I noticed that she was having some difficulty accelerating from a complete stop on the way to work.  On the way home it was bad enough that I had to gun the engine to keep her from completely stalling out.  Not good.  After a little research and a post on StellaSpeed, the consensus was that it was either a clogged idle jet or a bad spark plug.  Replacing the plug didn’t do the trick, so I cracked open the carburetor and blasted the idle jet with some carb cleaner.  Problem solved!

Total cost to fix it myself: $5 and an hour of my time.  Cost if I would have gone to the mechanic: Probably at least $100 in labor to come to the same conclusion.  Hopefully all my future Stella troubles will be this easy to fix.