February 2011 Archives

For those of you on the East Coast, here is a nice winter project, for sale right now on ebay. This scooter would probably appeal to someone who already has a bunch of Lambretta junk cluttering up their garage, but is lacking a suitable frame. Here, all you need to do is drop in your motor, attach a seat, and you're good to go. This would also be a good candidate to stick in a GP200 crate motor.

May 15th, 1951, Montlhery, France -- Lambretta reaches speeds in excess of 200 km/h on the Montlhery racetrack.

Plays on the classic UK World War II "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster are getting pretty tired by now... however, I'll make an exception for this one.  If you want to buy one, you can get it here.

Before there was an internet, there was mail order. Back in the day, you could buy just about anything if you had the right mail order catalog. Many companies specialized in certain items, but the two biggies - Sears and Montgomery Ward - sold just about everything. As we know, Sears sold Vespa scooters under the Allstate name. But not as many people are aware that Montgomery Ward also sold scooters. Wards scooters were called "Riverside". Wards didn't sell very many scooters compared to Sears, but they sometimes turn up. Just as Sears sold many different makes of motorcycles and scooters, so did Montgomery Wards. Most of the ones that you see are the Italian Lambretta Li125 Series III models, but they also sold Japanese scooters. The Japanese scooter that they sold was made by Mitsubishi. In the US, their distributor, Rockford scooters, sold them under the Rockford brand name. The Mitsubishi scooter was called the "Silver Pigeon" when sold under its own name, but called a Riverside when sold by Wards. There were several models of Pigeon sold by Wards that had various levels of trim and power. I believe that this is a C-80 model Pigeon, one of the better models.

The Pigeons are pretty nice scooters. The C-80's had overhead valve four stroke motors with automatic CVT style transmissions. Almost 5 hp on these bad-boys meant they were good for around 45 mph of blistering speed. Honestly, pretty comparable with the Vespa 125 of the day. Of course, unlike the Vespa/Allstate, there were not many of these sold, and virtually no parts support. As a result, the Pigeon is a very rare scooter in the US. I don't think I've ever seen one in person.

Click below the jump for some more pictures from the manual