Modern Vespa

The first round of parts is back from the bodyshop/paint and looking great! Some parts are still curing or needed to be retouched, so I will get those next week. Red "extra" parts are primed, new horn cast and the original spare sidecovers, but not painted yet.

No material was cut out or added, all the parts are the originals, he did it strictly body hammer and re-weld of the front cross brace that had a broken weld.
He actually could have made a few spots on the floorboards better with a thin Bondo layer, but he thought I said he could not use it, so I have some small irregular spots on the left rear of the floorboard where he could not smooth out the metal.
Still better than what came out of the factory.
Need to run new harness and control cables, that will keep me busy for a while...



Before picture, when I first bought it:


After the accident:



Back from the shop body shots:



You can see the "original" Silver inside the bucket area. He did a dead on match, except the new paint is much shinier and has more depth.


Close up of the painted punched front hub:



All the parts:

Looks great! How do you train the snails to stay on your horncrest like that?

Pheromones.

Those are really nice 2 tone FIAMMs. They did not work originally, primary because there were paper wasp nests in them!

Fitting, but thankfully the nests were long abandoned. Little work on the contacts that had rusted and they were good as new.

They were to be painted silver, but somehow ended up in the red paint pile. They look so nice I can't bear to ask him to repaint them again, so I am just gonna rock them. It will be part of the red/silver scooterboy theme, and I also have a set of cowls/horncast parts in silver to make it look "stock".


Only had a couple of hours to work on it today, especially when I discovered my roll of duct tape had less then 2 feet on it... quick run to the store to get a new roll. But I got the 2 hardest parts done: new cables and a new wire harness.

TravisNJ sourced me a sick set of new inner/outer cables, very low friction. How low? when I unbagged them to sort them out, I grabbed the bundle too close to the open ends...
suddenly there was a pile of silver snakes at my feet, gravity was plenty to let the inners slide out of the outers!

Thankfully I only had to re-run one cable by hand, the old one split in half as I tried to drag the new one through. Glad it was only one, it was not that hard, but it was no fun either. Got a few nice gouges on my hands from sharp edges in the tunnel where I was feeding the cable through.

It's not a real "project" without spilling some blood! Love the idea of keeping the Fiamms red...definitely.

Cant wait to see the finished product (after your hands have healed)

That looks great Russ.. it's going to be sharp.. that drilled hub looks bitchin'..
Can't wait to see it all together and hopefully hear it runnnn.
Cheers!

looks good mate the panelbeater did a good job




gonna put all that trucking shit back on?

i see you have two front hubs ...... good idea

Well, it is going back to the shop for a little more work.

Seems he got a bad batch of hardener, and the paint is very brittle. So brittle it is chipping on some of the parts just from my fingernail and has to be reshot on the bottom. It will also pull away with just blue painters tape, which means it is really messed up. Some areas that can flex a little, like the top of the headset, it is already crazing in some areas.

He is respraying all the parts with that batch of hardener (or catalyst, whatever the stuff is called, I am not a painter), which is basically the headset, 2 rims, the side panels and the bottom of the frame.

Annoyingly it is the NEW hardener, not the old batch. Having been burned in the past, normally he does a test patch when he moves to a new batch, but he was in the middle of the process and figured it would be fine. Murphy struck...

Well, at least we found it before I put everything back on.

No update for a while, but work has slowly progressed...

And I got her running this morning!

A lot more work to do to button it all up, but all the major parts are in: engine fork, gas tank, and most of the electrical work. Lighting on the headset is not going too well, but I will get it sorted.

Might be just a lot of bad bulbs blowing from the impact, there was at least one inside the headset that was smashed from the collision, and the headlamp lowbeam was burned out.

Burning filaments do not like getting slammed around!