Modern Vespa

Need room for more scooters?

Stuff that nasty motorcycle in the family room, your wife won't mind.

Mind you..... I'm writing this from a hospital bed....

Who cares about what your wife did to you... Is the MC alright??

That said, hope you will recover soon from whatever ailment you are suffering.

All the best!

Getting all of the two wheeled contraptions in my garage was tough enough. It's getting me bed in there now that is presenting a problem.

This was my living room last winter when I was restoring my VBA. I'm not married.

Thankfully my days of working in the living room are done. I love wrenching but I don't want to breath the oil and gas fumes 24/7 anymore

We have two garages (a two car and a one car). We also only have one car so that leaves plenty of room for 4 PTWs. The scooters (2) share the garage with the car. It's not even a squeeze. The motorcycles (2) occupy the single car garage along with all the tools, parts, work benchs, shelves and the PTW lift.

Plenty of room for my wife's MINI here...


A couple different angles of my work space...

When I had my scooter in my living room it was perfectly clean and empty of all fluids.

That's the best way to do it if you're going to work indoors. I didn't always have the luxury in the past. It's not practical if to empty all the fluids if you are just bringing the bike inside for a routine service.

I sometimes bring small parts inside to work on them. That usually earns me the stink eye. (I am married)

-Craig

Now that I have a PX 150 on the way (with a slight delay thanks to Sandy), my wife says we don't have room in the garage for a third Vespa. So I have strategically left the LX50 at the office and am pretending to make unsuccessful efforts at selling it. I hope nobody calls my bluff - I like the idea of having a 50, 150 and 250 from '05, '07 and '09 (not respectively).

This topic really hits home. I have a two car garage and two large SUVs. So, I'm selling my beautiful FJ Cruiser just to make room for my new Vespa. Right now my scooter is parked in a sympathetic neighbor's garage.

Lets see... big fat SUV.... beautiful, fun, efficient Vespa.....

No contest, dump the truck!


The Jawa in the family room didn't get me nearly the comments as the trail bike in the living room! You've got to choose carefully though, can't have the Triumph leaking oil on the floor and the damn Dnepr is just too heavy to get up the landing.

Try cleaning a bunch of guns on top of the dining room table.

Fritz,

Cool Dnepr! I haven't seen one of those here in the US. Looks like another Russian copy of the old BMW R71. Are the Dnepr and Ural motorcycles associated in anyway? What year is yours?

-Craig

LOL! My wife goes to the range more often then I do. Sometimes when I come home I'll find guns and a cleaning kit on the coffee table waiting for my arrival. As long as I'm cleaning her guns so she doesn't have to, it's all good with her.

-Craig

The Dnepr was a '79, it has the dubious honour of getting worse gas mileage than the Ford LTD that my wife was driving in those days, a true pig. I had it for about eight years, last I saw the old lump someone had put a BMW engine in it. The original motor ended up in a restored machine in the hands of a collector in Oregon.

The Dnepr and the Ural are basically the same piece of shit, the name coming from the largest natural feature near the plant they were made at. The Dnepr plant being near the river of the same name. The Ural coming from.... I guess a place with a giant urinal..... or maybe some mountains....

It is the best way to wax the scooter. Just take it apart and strip it. Inisde waxing is a lot of fun. I know you are probably talking about other kind of maintenance not just waxing. The only problem is that my garge is bigger than my living room.

Then why would you ever go in the house?

We need more garage space in the worst way. When I take a scoot out or put one (or all three) back in we call it "the struggle". It's a total pain in the ass to move everything around and out just to go somewhere on a scooter. We have a house built in the late 50's with a two car garage. There is no way two cars from the 50's or 60's would ever fit in this garage. I know back then most families had one car and the rest of the garage was used for storage. We have a 15" door and it's very difficult to put both (small) cars in and out. So yes, garage space is a big problem.

Bob

A friend from Ohio comes down to attend a Dnepr/Ural/sidecar rally and stops by. It is a good companion ride for our 2 stroke Vespas. Amazingly, although he uses lots of colorful swear words and subjects it to terrible verbal abuse, we have been on some fairly long rides with no breakdowns. Hijack off.

Thats a much newer one than I had. They actually do not break down very often, they just need a lot of tinkering and swearing to keep them going.

Although mine did briefly have a habit of blowing every fuse in the box at once without warning. You could actually hear the "Fffft" noise when they all let go in unison. I took to driving about with a pocket load of fuses (all the circuits were covered with the same type of ceramic 8 amp fuses!) After checking everything, I finally pulled the fuse box and found that the wires were individually wired in to the back of the box using nice big brass posts with grub screws.... and none of the screws had been tightened at the factory!

The bike had a six inch piece of welding rod sticking out of the frame, nicely enemeled, right where the man welding that frame finished up! It also had castings so porous that we had to coat the inside of the rocker covers with epoxy to keep the oil in and it had chunks of sand clinging to the inside of the sand cast crankcases. Yum!

Lovely Quality, its a wonder we ever considered the Soviet Union a threat!

A little update: My FJ sold in three days on eBay for the Buy Now price. So, I will be reclaiming 1/2 of my 20X30 two car garage in a week or so. My wife will be able to get in and out with her golf cart, and I will have my new Vespa 300 under my own roof. Yeah!

Ah yes! The Harley-Davidson motor cases had similar issues with porosity all the way up until the 1960's. I always coat the inside of antique motor cases with Red Gliptol. I can't say I've ever found residual sand in a Harley casting though.

Nice Honda CT-90... that was my first powered two-wheeler 40-some years ago.

The thing that used to earn me the stink-eye from my late first wife was rebuilding 2-barrel Weber carbs on the kitchen table in our apartment!

I'm with you. I built a new shop for the yard in the Spring which gives me a nice place to work, and park. The scooter spent the Winter in the living room prior to that.





Apologies for the weird mannequin. I took this photo to send to one of our rally sponsors. It's the only one I have of the interior.



For those interested in such things, we built this using traditional post and beam. All joints are pegged mortise and tenon, no screws or nails holding it together.

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Beautiful shop!

Again! Beautiful Shop!

Heavy wooden beams are just so damn nice!!!

That makes me feel better about my indoor waxing of panels and accessories. Now back to the garage which by the way looks nothings like the photos I've seen here. I think this thread is a subtle way of asking: "Is your garage cluttered?" Aaaaaand the the answer is YES!

All I did for my scooter shed, is to convert my kids playhouse. Resided it with cedar form the old gate, and added a bigger door!

Some jobs I still bring in the house. It's not fun lacing wheels when it's 107F in the garage...

Nice wheel ... Do you take them apart to polish them every once in a while?

No. Cleaning is easy enough with the wheel already laced. This wheel was relaced because I had to replace the hub. The bearing surface in the old hub was worn beyond servicable limits. I never relace a wheel with the old spokes. So this wheel got a new hub (old actually, from the 1950's but servicable) and new stainless steel spokes. The rim dates to 1970.

-Craig

It looks brand new!

Now back how how cluttery the garage is. Or not!

We actually started cleaning the garage today. We moved the teardrop out, we plan to take it out this weekend before winter storage. One thing led to another, and we got the garage about half cleaned. Both bikes fit nicely, bit I'll want to keep the truck in there once it starts getting cold.

Mmmmmm... wheel lacing, now theres a seriously satisfying job.

I draw the line a car wheels though, a friend asked me to rebuild a wheel for his series one Type E Jag, as he regularly explores its top speed potential I declined the opportunity.

Damn pleasant way to pass time though!

+1 ^^^^ Lacing wheels is one of my favorite things to do on a bike. I have no idea what the attraction is. I've always thought that laced wheels were beautiful. Spirograph was one of my favorite toys growing up and that was all about line art. LOL It's just fun to take a pile of parts and turn it into a wheel in an hour.

-Craig

Spirograph! Man you are seriously dating yourself now!

Agreed, its a wierd attraction but wheel building is just soooooooo relaxing!

Its enough to make me buy another motorcycle!

Sold my FJ Cruiser on eBay in three days. Got my Buy Now price. Starting Thursday morning, I'll have all the garage space I need!

Get an MP3!!!

Agreed on the wheel building... Used to do it all the time as a bicycle racer. 3 Cross, 4 Cross, 2 Cross, Radial, mixes, wooden rims, tubular vs. clincher, etc - you could build a wheel to your exact needs for a particular kind of race/rider with you choice of hub, spokes and rims.

But I will admit that the modern stuff with aero rims, carbon fiber and all that is kind of cool looking - even though the 'feel' of the wheels is pretty generic.

Desi B.

I would love to bring my scoot into the living room when the weather's crap! Unfortunately, the living room is small enough as it is, and there's 4 sets of pesky stairs in the dang way.

So we made a garage a priority on the list of acceptable apartments we were looking at. For the scooter.

We moved in in May. Wasn't until about 2 weeks ago that we even tried fitting the SUV in next to the Vespa.

That's how I got started too! Bicycle wheels are especially fun to lace because the spokes don't eat up your finger tips (they are much more flexible). We used to go as far as tieing the spokes with wire at the last cross point on our BMX bikes when I was a kid. Made the wheel a lot more rigid and able to take more abuse.

-Craig