Modern Vespa

Beautiful work!
The thought of reassembly is giving me anxiety!
I'm sure it will be amazing!

Me too!

Did you do a dry build Rob?

you could go swimming and drown in that shiny dark black pool of paint. VERY nice Rob.

Yes Sir, several. Im shitting twinkies thinking about putting this scoot together. I'm sure I'll have a couple nightmares. 😵‍💫

She's a beaut, Clark!

You just know when it's finally ready, it's gonna be so fine!

I have always stuck with single stage having read that base/clear would look wrong if you were trying to keep the original look. But there are definitely some advantages to it.

But I think a base/clear in a solid color would look pretty close to original too. Maybe it's because many base clear colors contain metallics. Factory paint wasn't particularly glossy especially on the older models. I do love a nice glossy paint job though.

I buffed the last pieces today. Of course I realized I forgot to paint the fuel cap when I touched up the fuel tank 🤭. It's amazing how fast dust floats onto the paint when I set out the parts. Maybe since it's black. Installing the wiring next.

Fantastic work, Rob!

Wiring harness, headset races and cables are in. Center rails are done. Plenty of smudge marks and fingerprints. I'll take care of those last.

Most excellent!

A thing of beauty sir.

I tip my hat to you

Oh wow!

This thing is going to be truly gorgeous.

I cannot wait for more photos at the finish.

Good Luck. 🤞👍👌🙏

Floor rails are done and I think they look pretty good over the black paint. I managed to chip the paint while removing a bad rivet, right off the start. I'm much calmer now. Took me an hour to find the steering column lock. It was right where I put it.

I need sunglasses for the blazing shine coming off that thing. Lordy.

Little bit more progress today.

Just. Wow.

It's so shiny, I worry that I might scratch it just looking at it.

For sure. I would even worry about just riding it. It looks museum quality, Rob. You would give Bar Italia a run for their money.

You guys are the greatest! This scoot wouldn't be this far along without your support.

I started wiring things up. The original taillight assembly is wired up and I installed a dedicated ground wire so no paint had to be scraped off. I tried to put the horn on and the diameter is too big. So much for Grade A repair! I'm going to use the new shell and rivet it onto my original horn. SaFiS, I think you did that to one of your builds.

I put the scoot on the centerstand but the springs really want to pull it forward without the engine installed. Going to finish painting the silver parts so I can get this engine in. Ray8, I really like those tires. The tread and rubber is better than the SIP tire.

Donatella is looking fantastic, Rob! Keep on plugging, the first ride is in sight!

The red of that taillight over the black paint... swoon.

Having seen the airplanes that Rob works on at his Day Job, none of this workmanship surprises me.

I'm still wanting a proper tutorial on the polishing work, though.

https://youtube.com/shorts/UioaB8voTPw?feature=shared

This was my engine startup.

I can walk you through the steps but it's really how you use the buffer. You can destroy a paint job in a blink of an eye. I'll try to do a little video showing how to go from 2500 to bling when I have a helper to film. The big electric buffer does the best job but you can't get into the tight areas with it.

A bit of experience that i've had with riveting horn grills/shells over the horn body…
-Quality rivets are VERY difficult to find.
-drilling out the old rivets always seemed to compromise the loudness of the horn. Mainly because the replacement rivets just couldn't create enough clamping pressure between the grill and the body, then the horn would be weak after that.
-I ended up using an angle grinder to cut the old grill off (while leaving the rivets and the clamping ring area still in place), then set the new grill over the top. Then just used the fours tiny screws to squeeze everything together to the scooter's horncast. Not ideal, but it worked.
-another time i used a die grinder and a hole saw to make the diameter a bit larger in the scooter's horncast in order to fit a larger diameter horn (i used a 12VDC horn for my particular application)

Alternately, you can get a freeway blaster and mount it to the fork underneath the mudguard. It'll be out of sight and WAY louder than any stock or aftermarket horn that's intended for a Vespa.

Good job !
Getting a perfect result, especially on dark paints is not easy, and nearly impossible with a rotary polisher. Rotary is good for polishing, but for final step a dual action polisher is required.

Most of a time using a rotary will look good, until you use panel wipe or IPA (which you be done in between each step).
The oils contained into the polish will fill and hide swirls and holograms.

I had a detail shop in the past, some customers used to come to me after they got their car fixed at a body shop, especially dark color cars, it was looking fantastic at the shop, then a few wash later, into the sun, it was an hologram party ! Just because the body shop did not finish the job with slow dual action & fine polish process.

You can get away with this by using a wax, this will hide holograms for a longer time, but won't be perfect.

Most of the time people buy a rotary machine and maybe don't want to spend money on dual action, thinking it is not not powerful compared to a rotary, but they are complementary, there is no comparison.

Instead of purchasing 2 machines, Makita (as you seem to like this brand) does a machine that is dual action, and by a turn of a switch becomes a dual action with forced rotation. This is less powerful than an rotary (not by much, but much safer to avoid going through the clear/paint) but has the ability to achieve a very good results for finishing in free dual action mode. Ref is Makita PO6000C, only issue is that is quite a big machine, not made for Vespa curves. Mirka makes perfect polisher for that case by wayyy more expensive !

I could speak for hours about polishing, I used to organise polishing class for enthusiast at my shop. Maybe I could open a topic about detailing...

I totally agree with you Colin. In the right light even with wax, there is a little swirl left over. I've come to terms with it since I'll be riding this scoot a lot and it's bound to get marks from just cleaning it. I would definitely use a dual action if this was a show scoot. The black looks great but it shows everything!

Man that's a lot of work! Looks great!

Back in the late 80's when I worked in a shop restoring English cars on the Cali central coast, I used a product called Liquid Ebony swirl remover on our restorations. It works awesome at removing swirl marks! If it's good enough for frame off restorations on Rolls Royce's, Jags, Triumphs, Aston Martins I think it will work for you as well! Give it a try!

Hec

The correct horn is now installed as well as the fu#*ing legshield trim. The headset went on pretty easy. Clutch and throttle cables hooked up to the levers. Waiting on some silver paint to arrive for the rear hub and fan shroud. I finished painting some random black bits yesterday.

That thing is AMAZING.

Superb !

Supreme.

Slick

Remind me… is that a Cushman GS150?

Seems like there are extra rivet holes around the Vespa GS badge area.

NM.

Went back to the start of the thread and saw it was a Cushman.

Im working on duplicating the original paint scheme on the Cushman badge. It has one scrape mark on an edge but is still in good shape.

Hibbert schooled me on the "VespaGS" badge for the Cushman imports. It's a flat white. I have the original one and will get it painted and installed soon.

Picked up an NOS rear drum from Scooter West. My drum is worn and the lugs are halfway cut through. Glad I found this one, just in time. It cleaned up nice and will get painted to match the front.