Modern Vespa

Soooo, the chrome rails for my 2008 LX150 arrived Friday & my shop called to let me know that a tech would be in town on Saturday to install them. I already had plans to leave town with friends but I couldn't pass up the chance to get this done without an hour & a half round trip for me. I was in a bit of a hurry to leave town when I picked up the scoot, so I took a quick glance, it looked ok, drove it home & put it away. The tech actually complained when I picked it up about how hard they were to install.
The next morning I went to check out the work more closely & discovered:
1) two scratches on my paint job in the rear where the rails join

2) The rails were uneven, the left one was clearly seated farther out than the right one which was snug against the rear side reflector.

Today I decide to loosen things up & see if I could get the rails seated properly. Hard to do indeed, in fact impossible! The piece that attaches the rails under the floorboard is bent & longer on one end than the other
Pretty poor machining job on Vespa's part. I also discovered that the right side reflector had half sheared off due to pressure from the rail I guess I need to talk to my dealer tomorrow. I was so ready to take some pics of my completed ride, but I guess that will have to wait.
I guess I'm not looking for some help here, just some sympathy. I'm not being too anal in expecting things to sit evenly am I?

when i installed them myself they were not to hard to put on ... instead they where hard to put together. as you can see from the pic the back two parts go together well after finding out that the hole was not large enough i had to dremel out the inside to make it fit, took about an hour of grinding away at it.

many people have had trouble fitting the crash bars, and it's very common to have to take a dremel to the parts to get them to mate together properly. it sounds like the bloke who installed them should have been a bit more patient.

there are some previous threads that detail the various things you have to do to make them fit - i'd do a search for you but i'm meant to be working right now.

Thanks for the suggestions. I did dremel the connections a bit. The big problem seems to be that the rails will not sit evenly no matter what I do. It is obvious to the naked eye that one side sits farther out from the frame than the other & the lower connecting bar was not welded together properly so that it sits at an angle. I guess I'll have to go to the dealer tomorrow & demand satisfaction.

I would be PISSED

first off they should of coved the area they were working on with Scrach Wrap

and if the rails didnt look right when they put them on take them off and get a differnt set

it would of been that easy

and I would not settle for Touch Up Paint or shitty rails

I went to the dealer today to give 'em hell & they are closed for two days for customer service training Kind of ironic considering my complaints.

Well, now I am royally pissed off !!!! The dealer had my scoot for a week. They called to inform me that they would be down in Oly on Halloween to return my ride; a day earlier than expected. Halloween was appropriately dark & gloomy + I had to leave town for Seattle ASAP, so I didn't really check their "repair" work until today. The scratches remain, untouched as far as I can tell. The rails are slightly better seated, but still visibly uneven side to side & poorly joined at the back. They snapped off both my side reflectors & replaced them with cheap ass flat reflectors held on with sticky tape !!! I'm going to have a very hard time not going ballistic on them when I call tomorrow.
I'd post photos, but the digi cam is tits up. Can anyone post a photo or a link to a photo of an LX with rails properly installed & original side reflectors still attached. I want to show the dealer how it should be done & that it is indeed possible. I'm soooo frustrated .

I just installed the complete Piaggio chrome kit on my LX150 on Sunday.

No instructions at all came with the kit, so I spent a good part of Saturday figuring out how it all went together, and another 4 or 5 hours on Sunday doing the actual install. In the end, it came out great, but I did a helluva lot of cussin'!

I had to do the Dremel bit in several places, and I had to be extremely careful where everything goes together in the back to avoid scratches... where you got 'em.

At that spot in the back, the same two cap screws hold the bracket for the grab rail, the bracket for the rear rack, and the end of the crash bar... and none of the holes line up with each other or the threaded holes in the scoot body. As flexing three different parts in different directions simultaneously was necessary, a few extra hands would really have come in handy. There is a similar situation at the front with the front rack and legshield bars, but not quite as bad. The whole job would have taken half as much time and been a lot less frustrating had Vespa provided threaded studs as the attachment points, rather than threaded holes.

As tough as it was to do the job neatly, I managed to do so having never done it before. There is absolutely no excuse for the shoddy work you got, Mocker.

As to the unevenness of the spacing of the rear bars to the body, that is the easy part, and there is even less excuse for them not getting that part right. While it may look like the center bracket was made unevenly, it's likely not... it's just installed off center. The center bracket that connects the front end of the rear crash bars to the scooter underside just clamps onto a sheetmetal lip with three bolts, and it can be loosened and slid side-to-side easily until it is perfectly centered.

There is no reason for them to have knocked your reflectors off, and no excuse for a non-original substitution.

Take 'em to small claims court if they don't make things right and compensate you for your time and trouble!

Dave

I have a full set of chrome. The only piece that fit was the front crash bar. The rest of the crap I bought from the dealer in Puerto Rico is sitting on a shelf in my junk room. A COMPLETE waste of good money and Piaggio/Vespa should be ashamed of themselves for distributing this crap!

When and if I feel so inclined, I may have a local welding shop give it a go or I may have a manufacturing plant make something out of stainless steel instead.

If anyone is considering buying the LX chrome kit, I would strongly recommend you think twice. If you decide to do it (despite these warnings), I reccommend the following:

- Get the dealer to do the install.
- If you insist on doing it yourself, be prepared to be very frustrated.
- Make sure you have about 4 times the amount of time you think you will need to complete the project.
- Be aware that the holes on the scoot will not be aligned with the chrome pieces.
- When ordering parts, ask for double the number of bolts. Those supplied are crappy quality and strip easily. Remember, the holes don't align with the chrome pieces!
- Buy a dremel tool. The chrome pieces will not fit together properly unless you ream out the female end ~ a LOT.
- Make sure you have metric allen keys.
- Make sure you have at least two people working on it. You cannot do it alone.
- Tape all parts of the scoot that might be damaged or scratched when the crash bars hit it while you try to force parts together.
- Be particularly careful around the cheap plastic/chrome rim on the rear light.
- GET THE DEALER TO INSTALL IT!

With my Piaggio GTS rails, I had to bend the rear mounting bracket in a vise on one side to get the rails not to rub the paint and to sit an even distance from the cowls on both sides. The quality is true crap. I used painters tape to keep the paint from being scratched. It's pretty likely that the type of scratches you can get easily when mounting these things can be rubbed out and will be gone pretty easily unless they are through the clear coat on metallic colors (like the Midnight Blue) or down to the primer on the non-metallics (like Dragon Red). Your refelector problem is inexcusable but they are not terribly expensive if you have to order them from a dealer with a brain.

It's not really THAT bad! I managed to do it by myself with a little forethought. I thought that the quality of the components was quite good. The chrome plating is certainly very heavy. The small misalignment of the holes was frustrating to deal with, but -- with 20-20 hindsight -- if I had dropped everything and gone out and bought 4 metric threaded studs with chrome capnuts, it would have all gone together quite easily. It also would have been nice had some basic instructions been included. It's obvious that Piaggio never intended these to be consumer-installed.

Dave

Thanks for the responses folks. I'd love to do the work myself, but I've got tendonitis & fibromyalgia which makes it incredibly painful to do that kind of work. The chrome looks so good on my black scoot, so I'll keep on the dealer's ass until they get it right rather than giving up.

I installed the bars on my GTS myself. Re the fit in the hole, I just reamed out the inner lip of the hole and the outer lip of the male part iwth a file. The hole itself is large enough. It's just that the lip interferes from the cut they make when they cut the bar and from the chroming process. It took me five minutes to ream out the lip. A bit of WD40 and it slips right in. When I put in the set screw, I added a bit of Loctite (not the hard gripping stuff, the intermediate grip stuff that is blue) so the screw won't back out from vibration.
Regarding the uneven spacing of the bars, the part that attaches under the floorboard slides. You should be able to loosen the bolts under there and slide the bars until they are even on both sides, then re-tighten. Again, I used Loctite on those bolts.
Regarding scratches, there are some instructions on this site where someone attached old socks to the ends of the bars when putting them in place. I didi that. Those are what scratch the paint as you move the bars into the proper location.
I plan to take the bars off when I take it in for servicing. The bars have to come off to take off the plastic pieces that form the bottom of the fenders to get access to the engine. I don't trust the shop to take off and re-mount the bars without f****** it up.