September 2009 Archives

Moving on to the rear hub and clutch requires that I get the scooter up on the lift, and get the motor up off the ground.  I locked the front wheel in the wheel-vise, and got the motor airborne.  This allowed me to get the rear hub off the rear axle without too much trouble.

I can't tell you how much easier it is to work on these scooters with a table lift.  You can do all this work with the scooter on the floor if you have to, but it is just much less of a strain up on the lift!

Warning - below is a legal description of the California law as it pertains to vehicle registrations. Ignore if you don't want to dork-out.

I did a bit of research into the issue of paying back registration on a vehicle that hadn't been registered in awhile.  This comes up often with scooters, because people just don't pay the reg, and then sell them.  So when you buy the bike and change the title, you have to pay all the past registrations.  I read on an online forum that it was possible to get out of having to pay the back reg for a vintage vehicle, but that most people (and most DMV employees) didn't know about the law.  So that got me on the road of doing some legal research into the guts of the California vehcle code...

Here is one you don't see every day... a Lambretta SX200 for sale on Craigslist in Los Angeles.  For a fairly rare scooter, there are actually quite a few SX200's around the US.  I think people just were not as cost-conscious about them here as they were abroad, and consequently a higher percentage of them were sold here than in Europe.  However, you just don't see them come up for sale often.  Mainly, I think, because most of them are in the hands of scooterists or collectors, who just won't sell them.  (I can tell you that I won't ever sell mine!) 

Here we have a nice original un-restored Lambretta LD right now on ebay.  There were a ton of these things sold in the US, but you just don't see too many of them on the road, or at rallies.  I think they have some of the same issues that keep the 50's Vespas in garages... mainly that they are slow and have terrible lights.  However, I would say that the 50's Lambrettas are more competent scooters than the 50's Vespas.  Nevertheless, it is hard to drive a scooter that tops out at 45 mph on today's roads, that's for sure. 

  I don't know the details behind this picture, but is sure looks grizzly.  I sure hope that the person riding it is ok.  Here you see the remains of a rare and valuable Lambretta SX200.  It looks like it had nice original paint.  If you look closely, you can see the running in sticker on the inside of the crumpled legshields. There really doesn't appear to be much that can be salvaged from the wreck.  I wish a speedy recovery to the owner...

The Vespa 90SS is among the rarest and most sought after models by collectors.  There were only about 6,000 of them made, and not many of those have survived.  They were never officially imported to the US, but a handful were sold in Canada.  I would guess that there are about 20-30 of them now in the US, mainly imported in the last 15 years by serious scooter collectors.  I would suspect that virtually all of them are fully restored at this point.

It is strange, therefore, to see any of the motors for sale without the scooter.  Yet, here we have a set of 90SS cases for sale on Ebay in the Los Angeles area.  Over the past few years, I've seen a few 90SS cases come up on Ebay, and I think that this set was one of those.  I remember being suspicious before, and I still am. 

Given the large interest in the 90SS, it would not be surprising if some Asian workshop took normal smallframe cases, and replaced the stamping.  These cases look fairly beat, and the picture of the motor number stamping area looks a bit off.  I'll have to check on my 90SS motor, but it sure seems strange that the motor numbers are so poorly aligned.  Also, the whole area looks so rough, and the edges of the VIN plate look blunted on the left side.  I don't know, but it just looks fishy to me.  If it were me bidding on these, I'd ask a lot of questions and do my homework... if they are genuine, then they shouldn't be cheap... but I would hate to pay a lot of money for a set of cases for a restoration if they were fakes.

Quick, what is it?  Is it a Vespa GS?  Nope, it is actually a Vespa knock-off made in the good ol' USSR!  The Russians were prone to copying vehicles with proven designs from other countries.  One of the more famous is the Lada automobile, which was a direct copy of a Fiat sedan from the early '60's.  As they used to say of the Lada in the 80's with a stoic wit "car of the year... in 1961!".

Not a lot of people know that the Soviets also copied the Vespa.  The scooter was called the Vyatka, and is rarely seen.  The Eastern Bloc made tons of scooters, the Vyatka being only one model.  If this article is correct, they made a stunning 1.7 million Vyatkas over the years.  Strange then, that so few have survived...

Read more here.

You can find the image here.

Now that I had tracked the problem down to the intake manifold, all I had to do was tighten it down, and the problem would be solved... right?  Uh-huh, well it is never that easy in vintage vehicle land. 

I noticed right away that someone had replaced one of the studs which the manifold mounts to, to a bolt.  So there was a case stud on one side, and a bolt on the other.  Naturally, it was the bolt side which was loose.  As I attempted to tighten it, I realized that something had stripped.  Of course, it was not the bolt which was stripped, but the threads in the case.  This is the reason why studs are used in applications like this.  The case is made of soft metal, and it is very easy to overtighten something, and strip out the threads. 

Now, I was faced with a problem.  The area which was stripped was very hard to reach.  In order to get to it, I would have to take off the top end and fully drop the motor.  With all of that out of the way, I saw that the case didn't appear to be destroyed, and I thought that I could do a thread repair with a heli-coil.

I do a lot of work on scooters in the garage.  Mainly I try to squeeze an hour or two of garage time in on weeknights if I'm not too tired.  Sometimes, if I'm really lucky, I can get a solid block of several hours during a weekend day... but that is a rarity.  I'm going to try to document the work I do in the "Garage Time" segment.  So without further ado, here's the first entry, motor work on a '67 Sears Primavera VMA1.

This scooter came in with the classic symptoms of an air leak.  Those are high reving motor, which settles down when you pull out the choke, and a chirping sound when it is running.  The chirping sound is often a symtom of something not tightened down properly and air getting sucked into the combustion chamber.  An air leak on a two stroke is not only a bad thing, it is downright deadly.  If left unrepaired, an air leak creates a lean air/fuel mixture condition, extreme heat in the combustion chamber, which then results in a melted piston...

I live in California.  As anyone involved in the vintage vehicle world knows, there is a sort of aura about old cars and motorcycles that have lived their whole life here in the state.  It means they have never seen road salt, harsh weather, and have generally not been bitten too deeply by the rust monster.  Sure, you see the rust-buckets out here, but honestly, most 50's and 60's cars from the East Coast have returned their ferrous metals to the mother earth by now.  For us in California, one sure method of provenance used to be that the vehicle had its original old style black (or yellow) plate.  Things are changing now, and one can now register any 60's vehicle with the black plate.  So that will be less and less of a factor in determining where the vehicle came from... however people are always looking for that extra detail in their special vintage scooter, motorcycle, or car.

On the scooter side of the world, as with almost all of the vintage vehicle scene, there is a swing away from overdone restorations, and a value on originality.  Even with some imperfections - what those on the concourse call "patina" - there is more intrinsic value these days from a collector standpoint in a totally original finish.  One clear hallmark of originality on a scooter is the "running in" sticker.

A lot of people attempt to fix up an old scooter.  Not a lot of people take the time to document the steps and the work that goes into the undertaking. 

Here's a blog by a guy in Canada who is getting to the end of a two-year restoration on a rare '52 Allstate.  As I discussed in an earlier post, the '52 was the first year that Piaggio imported scooters into North America, and they were only sold by Sears under the "Allstate" name.  There are two versions of the '52, and this is the later version with the US outline badge.

Luckily for him, he made friends with a good body man.  The cowls and front fender on these early Allstates were made of aluminum.  They are easy to dent, and hard to repair properly.  You could easily pour thousands of dollars into making a messed up frame look correct. 

At this point, he's got the motor out for a rebuild, and the frame appears to be done.  I'm interested to see the progress of how he gets the cables and wiring in the frame.  They sure are a pain to do on these early scooters!

Great blog, check it out.

One thing about vintage scooters that is appealing to me is that they were meant to be economical transportation, yet a lot of thought went into style and design. When you normally think of budget vehicles, you don't normally think of them as "beautiful". On the other hand, being made as cheaply as possible didn't leave room for a lot of creature comforts or even technical accessories that are quite useful, but could drive up the price. Note that only the most basic gauges were provided - a speedometer and odometer. No gas gauge, no volt meter, no temperature gauge, etc.