Modern Vespa

everybody should spend some time offroad on a trail bike early in their riding career.

its great fun and it improves bike handling skills immensely. I'm pretty sure some of the close calls I've had in traffic over the years didn't end badly because of the trail riding experience I accumulated early on.

I have owned a lot of motorcycles prior to owning a scooter. I have mainly ridden sport and adventuring tour style motorcycles, but can and do have fun on anything with two wheels. Not including my wife's bikes this is what is currently in the garage, Vespa GTS is my commuter / townie bike, Beta Xtrainer 300cc 2-stroke is my barely street legal off road bike, and a KTM 690 as a gravel road / all around adventure bike.

To Guzzi Gal, Xtine and anyone else riding a Moto Guzzi. What forum are you following for your Moto Guzzi? I'm looking into their travel/adventure bike V85 TT. I like to know which configuration to get.

When I googled Moto Guzzi forums, the options are not great. Have to say this forum is very much a part of the Vespa experience much like Mr. Robot from scooter west.com makes the Vespa ownership that much more satisfying. I believe Jess is the guy I should be thanking.

https://wildguzzi.com/forum/

What Jas67 said. Lots of good folks there, and it's super active.

Had Vespas and Lambrettas since I was 15 and then swapped one for a motorcycle at some point in my 30's.

Currently own below Triumph Tiger for Touring.

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Nice picture, I presume that's a Tiger tank in the background?

Umm... It's a Tank of some sort!!

I'd bet Sherman... or one of its many derivatives.

Earlyish... perhaps Made in Canada under licence.

I might have mentioned before, I came to scooters by accident. A local acquaintance offered me a scooter for free in a thousand pieces, which he had been unable to resurrect, so I took it home and put it together, got it running, then my wife claimed it. She had never ridden motorbikes at all, but loved the scooter. In order to be able to ride with her, I got another scooter, which I couldn't make work reliably, and then a third, which I now ride all the time.

I am a more long term motorcyclist and have two motorcycles currently in addition to the three scooters.

I have an ADV-converted '92 GS500 that always seems to need some kind of tinkering, mostly I guess because it's 30 years old so the half of it that I haven't already replaced is worn out and about to die.

Then there's the 2012 Bonneville that I wrecked a little over a year ago and then rebuilt it myself. It's "the one," and that's the main reason I always have to tinker with the Suzuki, because I never ride the Suzuki so it just sits with gas going bad in the carbs while I'm out riding the Triumph.

Truth is, though, the [not]Vespa is so easy to get in and out of my garage and park wherever I am going that I have been using it about 90% of the time when I am just running a quick errand. It has mostly replaced my Jeep for those kinds of trips. Now the other motorcycles are mostly reserved for longer recreational rides or any time I need to go somewhere that requires >50mph sustained riding or more than a half hour in the saddle.

There is clearly something with Triumphs and tanks...

I will play

Yes, a Sherman, looks like an early export model. Perhaps an M4A2? Imagine being part of a crew of four stuffed in that tin can? They were brave beyond comprehension.

Chris from CLE

http://pianadelleorme.com/pages/?page_id=129

Latina, Italy.

I've been in one of those tin cans, buttoned up. Not a pleasant place, especially for the lower positions.

Shit Attila.... you been leaving your toys out again?

Yeah, the weight.

And oil leaks ! ( if we're talking old school Triumphs here )

As I was not using it regularly I used to put an old cookie tray under my Triumph during winter storage. About once a month, while checking batteries, I would rag the tray out.

During one visit I was shocked to see virtually no oil had leaked out over the past few weeks.

The cause of this great change?

It was an unusually long winter and the old girl had quite simply run out of oil ( engine & oil tank, primary and transmission! ) saved me changing it in the spring as I simply had to top it up.

My Enfield's transmission would stop leaking when it was cold. As it was filled with a 50/50 mix of EP90 gear oil and bearing grease the stuff would thicken so damn much that it simply wouldn't flow.

Why again do we miss the good old days?

Nostalgia is funny like this. I have been trying to help my dad get his nostalgia motorcycle working for a year now. By now he's convinced that the modern bikes are A-OK. It's been nearly a year since he bought this old CL350 and only yesterday were we able to get it to run on both cylinders with good spark well enough for him to take it over to get it inspected before the registration expires day after tomorrow.

I think it was just routine to have to work on stuff all the time. Remember when 10K miles was a lot on a motorcycle, and 20K was near infinity, 30K was the domain of only the elite? Yeah, I remember when 100K miles was so uncommon on a car, they didn't even have enough odometer digits to show it. Nowadays you will gladly buy a Triumph with >30K on it and expect it to work perfectly all the time, right alongside your Toyota with 250K miles on it.

In my garage, my 30 year old "simple" "bulletproof" Suzuki twin is the one that requires constant work, and I also have a Triumph, a Yamaha scooter with 12K on it and two Indian-built Vespa clones.

The old english bikes do not lose oil, they have the "cycle". And you can't do anything about it, you buy them that you already know.

I had a Dnepr from Russia, it was much the same. Except it didn't loose oil through crappy seals or poor gaskets, it lost oil through the porous walls of its castings... it just sweat oil!

The rocket covers were so porous they had to be sealed by painting the inside with black epoxy. This bled through and left the covers spotted like a leopard, so the outsides got coated too.

The damn thing also got worse gas mileage than my wife's 18 foot Ford Sedan.

Oh how I do love my Suzuki.

Have you ever seen what the largest Italian tank looked like in World War II?
It was with engine Fiat (diesel).
https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M13/40

And it could go faster backwards than forwards.

I once read that Rommel said that the problem with the Italian soldier was not the man, it was his shit equipment. Apparently these things could take a hit, but only once as the rivets would fail and large pieces of armour would drop off. A low frontal hit would often drop the front plate leaving the driver completely exposed. There's a reason the Tiger, Panther and the Sherman were welded.

Showing off the Moto Guzzi V85tt I picked up a few days ago. Still relearning how to operate the clutch. Already made a fool of myself on the Wildguzzi forum for having trouble starting the bike. Turns out the kill switch on the Guzzi is a latching button. So every time after I used the kill switch I was not able to start the bike without pressing on the kill switch again. Definitely better design on the GTS300 with the momentary kill switch.

Nice one. Welcome to the Guzzi family.

Congrats! Nice choise of colour too.

I'm impressed of the design - Guzzi not traditionally being an 'ADV bike' brand, yet this looks the part and has good ride reviews too.

My favorite quote about old Britbikes. "They don't leak oil, they're just marking their territory"

While my Vespa GTS 250 still in the most frequent ride over my BMW K75C, I'm in the process of shifting from one side of the dark to another.

A few days ago I purchased a 2022 Royal Enfield Himalayan motorcycle. It will take on the dirt and gravel roads I have been using the Vespa to explore. And the BMW will find a new home.

As soon as I find time and the weather cooperates, I'll haul it home from Battlefield Harley-Davidson in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. They are also a Royal Enfield, Vespa, and Piaggio dealer. I just wish they were closer.

An excellent choice.

PM me the details of the K75 would you ?

This is my Kawasaki Versys 1000 SE. I'm totally in love with it, but in a completely different way compared to the GTS.

I think motorcycles and Vespa's go together perfectly. You just shouldn't compare the two.

This is my current bike: 2018 Triumph Street Twin. I finally got her set up to my liking.

I traded the GTS for 4 reasons.
1: I currently can only afford to maintain one bike at a time.
2: Vespa dealers in my region have been disappearing. I don't trust myself to do all my own maintenance yet.
3: I'm at a point in time where interstates are just part of the equation and traffic is
4: Bless her, but my particular GTS had issues. Still more reliable than most of the cars I've had, but...coolant system crapped out (hoses corroded from the inside out in her 3rd? year), instrument cluster died mysteriously and resulted in a second set of odometer readings. There were a few more things that raised an eyebrow over the years, but those were the memorable ones.

I'll probably get a pre-HPE GTS again after my next relocation.

Triumphs are cool and todays are much better than the early versions suffering from Lucas-itis.

Comparing bikes with scooters isn't all bad. My 250GTS is so much quicker than the Suzuki 250 cafe racer that it confuses the hell out of my riding buddies.

Actually, up our local twisty roads, the GTS compares very well with the motorcycles I normally ride with. Well enough to make their owners nervous... just when is that damn thing going to fly off the road and disappear into the undergrowth?

Merrily walking down the sidewalk at idle, shaking parts off at speed
The lucas-itis came from the lack of a balance shaft(s), no lightbulb filament, electrical connection or speedometer was safe, generally failing at your furthest point from home
There was this sense of achievement, when you could go a week or two without much attrition.

Who could ever forget the joy of wacking #3 phillips screws tight with a hand impact

Don't forget some of the bad parts that made no sense. The stator lived inside the primary drive case where it was sprayed with oil containing micro steel particles from the primary chain that shorted out the windings. They eventually coated the stator with resin. It lasted a little longer, but not much.

The Lucas electrics on my 53 Triumph were dead reliable, nothing ever failed, not even the headlamp, in eight years of service. I once read an article in The Classic Motorcycle where they interviewed a retired engineer who had worked at Lucas in the late 60s, early 70s. He put the problems down to the demands of customers to provide components at ever cheaper prices.

That would make sense as my new Jawa made in 1977 was covered with Lucas equipment and EVERYTHING failed. I should have know when all four turnsignals packed up, one at a time, in the first week. That bike was very reliable, but only once I got rid of the Lucas crap.

I remember working on a late model MGB and the lighting components on that thing were total junk, imagine depending on the plating on a plastic housing for your ground. Plating that cracks as soon as the mounting screws are tightened.

Note the sandbags in front of the driver of this example:

Alfa Guilietta many years ago glanced a wall in Italy, the chrome headlight ring popped out and all the lights went out.