Modern Vespa

Drive by posting!!!!

Pretty sure you need these for the Oil! Or the riverside…

IJS!

Ha! I put a set on my buddy's bugeye Zuma 50 after the third Airsal e'splosion. Got him a gremlin bell too:

Por que no los dos

Sí, sí!

New fork bearings and races arrived this morning.

I think I'm going to swap out my super-bald rear tire first, since it occurs to me that I didn't have these handling issues with the other motor, which *didn't* have a super-bald tire on it.

Glad I jumped to ordering parts before I engaged my brain.

This is the way.

It's how you know I'm a Real Scooterist.

I swapped out the rear tire this afternoon, but didn't have a chance to test ride it yet.

The old tire was pretty bald and squared. It used to have a groove down the centerline.

You're not a pro unless you do it with everything, not just scooters….


I, uh, um, have a friend like that….
He goes to the store and leave without the only thing he actually went for all the time. It's so frustrating. I mean I hear it is anyways…


And man that tired is balder than I!

That thing looks pretty cool, but while it says "a boy can re-groove," there's nothing about middle-aged men, so I should probably take a pass.

Ginch.... That is a whole buncha Safety Third!

Well i have to 100% agree with you that the CP air filter system is a complete failure. There's just not nearly enough room for the rubber elbow to fit between the carb and the side panel. When the panel is installed, it crushes in the rubber elbow down to about a 5/8" thick opening!

With the Quattrini, it's even worse. It would collapse in on itself from the draw even with the cowl off so I could watch it fail and remove all doubt about it, though.

So I got out for a test ride with a rear tire that actually has some tread on it. And...it's pretty much fixed.

I can also tell that the fork bearing is a little too loose, but that's an easy fix.

I'm a little bit blown away by how much of a difference a not-totally-worn-out tire made in the handling, to be honest.

I need to make getting the new tire mounted a priority, but I'm pretty damn happy to be almost through this period of frustration. And I (probably) didn't even need the new fork bearings.

Lammy.
Jammy.

Yep. It doesn't take a whole lot of wear in the centre to create a practically invisible flat spot as I said to the guy in the PX stability thread. Easy fix though - you need to ride twisty roads more!

What's interesting is that you didn't feel it as the back end feeling a bit squirrely.

one nice thing about rotating the tires from front to rear is that on the front they tend to wear the sides more, and then when moved to the back it finishes off the center and when fully done it's more evenly worn.

I had noticed that the back end felt really squirrely going over any sort of imperfection in the pavement, like even things as small as lines painted on the road.

The real "aha!" moment was when it occurred to me that prior to the motor (and with it, rear tire) swap, I hadn't noticed anything other than the warped brake. That and looking at it and seeing how bald it was.

I did a LOT of touring miles on that tire. The result definitely showed up in how it rode. In this case, the rear tire is wider than the front, so rotation was not an option. I may fall back to a 3.5x10 at some point because I'm not sure the wider tire really made a difference, but it did mess me up at the end.

what tires are you running? I have a hard time finding good 3.5x10 available in the US.
Quattrini! Is it my imagination that they sell these engines without detailed manuals and expect the buyers to figure it all out? Seems to be the italian way lol
Good stuff!

Once you have gone enough wheelies, you will.

Agreed that finding Heidenau's stateside has gotten really hard, especially scooter tires. This one is a 100/90-10, which is great until it's not. I couldn't find a K61, so I went with a K80.

I ordered the replacement from a place called Midwest Traction (midwesttraction.com). Revzilla doesn't seem to be importing Heidenau's any more, which is a bummer. Probably tariff-related.

I also ordered a 3.5x10 SIP Performance tire, which is apparently a white-label Heidenau and it's been good for the few miles I've managed to put on it thus far. Most high-end performance stuff is like that, IMO. The assumption is that if you're playing at that level, you already know what you're doing. It'd still be nice to have a little detail on things like what the optimal port timings for a cylinder are. Quattrini give squish targets, which is easy to measure, but past that you're on your own other than being told not to mess with the ports themselves. Hah!

The Lammy geometry and balance is such that you have to have a pretty insanely fast bike before you can't keep the front wheel on the ground. I can feel the suspension lighten when I hit the power band in first, but it never loses steering. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Okay...I'm official again.

What I really need is a LI210 badge. Hmmm....

Dig it.

Me too.

Ditto, two thumbs up!!!

An engine is an engine haha. Working with japanese bikes and being used to everything being diagrammed out it was a surprise that they just give you a pile of parts and a 'here you go!'. Italian guy Sacha has some great videos on utoob going over his quattrini builds.

I got my city grips tires from Italy via ebay seller https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_ssn=gripmoto_it&store_name=tyreocerchiegommeonline
I know they're 60mph tires, it's another way I'm speed limiting myself haha. Is second set of tires I've purchased from seller. Good seller, fresh tires and ships super fast. I've gotten lucky with tariffs being cancelled. Fedex wanted to charge me $45 tariff fee for the tire purchase. Emailed fedex dispute dept simply asked them to cancel the fee since the court recently invalidated the jackass' tariffs. Same thing happened a couple months ago when I bought an Italkast seat from avotecnica right before tariffs were ruled illegal the first time, that fee was also canceled by fedex after I disputed it. ____ tariffs!!!

Those who know, know. But this just arrived in the mail today. I've been wanting one for the past, oh…7 years?

but my TV still has all the original housings, but this may make me replace one.

They're going quick. I've been emailing him back and forth for the past two years, checking in every 3 or 4 months to see if he was going to manufacture more of them. He contacted me an about a month ago telling me he has another production run of them coming up and that i would be on the waiting list.

The guy who sells them is an old BSSO scooter racer. He used to race "The Cooler" lambretta. If you ever had a subscription to SCOOTERING magazine, then you probably read his name (or more likely read about that lammy track bike) in one of the articles.

https://www.lambrettasense.co.uk/product-page/copy-of-qr2-lambretta-rear-brake-cable-now-fits-all-models-s1-to-gp

I was at some rally many many, years ago (maybe High Rollers in Vegas?), and i saw the GP TS1 "FÜCKER" Lambretta poppin wheelies. And when i mean wheelies, i'm NOT talking about just lifting the tire a couple inches off the ground. His bike was up at about a 45 degree angle multiple times!

That is a badass looking (and, I'm sure, riding) scoot.

As for wheelies at a given power output, it's mainly about the lever. If you think of the bike as a lever with the rear wheel as the fulcrum, you'll see that the seat on that TS1 is set WAAAAY further back than mine. Almost over the rear wheel, so he can get into a full crouch while riding. The front of his seat is about where the back of mine is, so I have a lot more moment on the lever than he does.

He's got a lot more power than I do, I'm sure, but then compare his seat to mine. The front of the racer back of his seat is at about the same point that my seat ends, there at the rear badge.

I watched a video a while back about a guy with custom drag lambrettas where they'd lengthened the frame six inches so they could sit that much further forward to keep the front wheel down.

Also, part 2 of the front brake repair is up.

Is the riverside looking wistful or flaunting its health.
Like the Mona Lisa - It's hard to tell.

If you're one of my scoots, you should always be contemplating your mortality.

I believe the SIP tires are IRC, but the BGM tires are Heidenau.

surprised there aren't foot pegs in the rear for laying on the fucker haha!

Just saw your part 2 video. A couple of months ago I finished off the BGM Sport 3.5x10 rear tire on my Stella and I bought another. I rotated my front to the back and put the new tire in front, but this time I mounted it "backwards" so the tread pattern more closely aligns to how it is on most motorcycles. The "arrows" point up if you look at the front tire from the front, and if you look at the rear tire from behind. While they say one rotation direction on the tire, I figured this wouldn't hurt to try.

I'm not sure if it was coincidence but I did notice a slight decrease in stability especially above ~72mph. It feels twitchier, and when I did a short blast to 76mph I got a very brief but ass-clenching wobble.

I am going to flip the tire back around and see if that changes anything, but I also know that my stock suspension Stella with non-balanced LML split rims+tube tires is not exactly the gold standard for high speed stability anyway.

I've run tires that I installed "backwards" before and never could really tell a difference, but maybe that's just because they were better than what I had, but still sub-optimal.

In this case, though, that thing was borderline hazardous.

So I bit the bullet and had the remaining local tire place do the tire swap for me. Other than breaking the bead, I'm not certain that was the right choice.

Whatevs. New tire is on so I should quit complaining.

I'm going to go ahead and replace the fork bearing races, because I'm still not satisfied with the handling.

And in other news, I lost the silencer again. I think it was on the way to work, so hopefully I'll find it tomorrow. If not, I'll get to fabricate a new bracket and buy a new silencer. Yay.

There is a contingent, lets call them a population, of readers, who are struggling to parse as well as

I blame posting from my phone.