Modern Vespa

anyone know of a place that sells stainless bolts for the body work, blinkers, breaks, ect. mine are rusting and i am currently sanding, acid bathing, Rust-o-luem Priming and then Rust-o-luem painting them. but i would love to get them stainless anyway. Anyone know how to or where to buy them? Any thoughts? thanks

I've only gotten replacement bolts for my rear rack and backrest, so far. But Ace Hardware had exactly the same metric-hex-rounded-top ones, in stainless. Decent selection of slightly oddball stuff there.

a big sears hardware _ tools and appl only- has a good seection
of mm stainless

HomeDepot stocks some of the bolts and other bits in stainless. Sometimes they are in the green bags on the wall, sometimes they are in the drawers below the bagged items.

www.mcmaster.com

Expensive, but an unrivaled selection of doohickeys and whatchamacallits. I've bought more stainless steel parts there than I care to count...

crap you are not kidding Jess. thanks for the site. also guys i will check out home depot but i am kinda skeptical.

My favorite starting point is to type "socket head cap screws" into the search field. That brings up most of what I usually buy. Then start specifying what you want -- length, thread, metric/inch, material, and so on. It'll narrow down until you have just one (or a few) choices.

ya, i was also looking at the screws for the blinkers. thoughs small screws are rusting pretty bad, expessially since the scoot is indoors and never in the rain. cool site but wow the prices are high. i will outfit my bike with some soon. also have you experienced problems with the frame rusting. they seem to be pretty bullet-proof but i really don't know. i just don't want to find a big rust patch some day. also i see that there are clips for the screws to thread into, do they sell these "U" shaped clamps in stainless? thanks so much.

Our Ace Hardware has a surprisingly good selection of SS hardware. Pretty pricey, though.

Take a look at Gardner-Westcott

http://www.gardner-westcott.com/motor_pdf.html

Wow, what a great web site!!! Kinda pricey, but it's got everything! Thanks!

i will flip through Gardner-Westcott as well thanks

Another great place is Fastenal. I go to 'em at work all the time.

That looks like a good one too. I'll check them out.

Whoa! That's more effective than porn. Good links.

If you want to buy the stuff in person, yatch supply stores are full of stainless hardware.

Lowe's also stocks quite a few stainless parts. One last resort would be West Marine.com - a boating supply catalog with possibly a local store if you are near any large body of water.

Go to West Marine. The only thing they sell is stainless steel. They have a very large selection of nuts, bolts, and other things that are resistant to salt. Also a wide range of polish and other things to make your Vespa look nice.

Ace and Lowe's have lots of SAE SS hardware, but I was very disappointed in their SS Metric selection.

Wayne B

Also a great spot to buy bearings. You can buy the 6302 bearings for the LEADER reduction gearbox for less than $7 a piece. Also, if you're close enough to one of their warehouses, your order will arrive the next day.

At work we buy all kinds of stuff from them for that reason. If we need 50 or so oddball bolts, we just get it there because they have the quantity in stock and it shows up the next morning. I can't go to the hardware store 2 blocks away and find more than 10 of any specialty fastener or item.

Both McMaster-Carr and MSCDirect are big industrial supply houses with multiple huge warehouses strategically placed all over the US. They both have multiple-thousand-page catalogs of ALL kinds of useful mechanical stuff.

Sure, their prices are a little high, but consider the fact that they stock EVERYTHING, and will do everything in their power to get it to you in a day or two. And they don't seem to care if your order is for $.50 or $50,000. You are paying a little extra for one-stop shopping with great customer service.

Yep. My orders from them usually arrive from their LA warehouse in a day or two. Sometimes, the parts have to come from Chicago, depending on how obscure it is. Even then, they get here fast.

Their service is really outstanding, too. In an age of crap service, McMaster stands head and shoulders above nearly everyone.

First time I ordered from them, I put in the wrong ZIP code. I called them on a Sunday night around 9pm and there was a live person who answered the phone, fixed my order, and it still arrived the next day.

Marine supply stores have quite a few clever pieces of stainless steel hardware. What they do not have is much in the way of metric machine screws or other metric fasteners. I've had the best luck locally with Ace Hardware and Tacoma Fasteners.