Water-cooled
30
EXCLUSIVE
CELEBRATING
41hp Vespa from Germany
years of
Inside the Lambretta
prototype twins #348 June 2015
THIS COULD BE YOU!
HYDRO-GRAPHICS
INSIDE THE LATEST
WIN A LAMBRETTA £3200! WORTH
CUSTOM
PLUS INSURANCE TOO!
CRAZE
KEVLAR JEANS
SHOCKING TEST RESULTS!
EXCLUSIVE
Plus
Tested
305cc
Lambretta
Lambretta street racer
Targa Twin Series 2
10 mods for a reliable Vespa, Le Beat Bespoke, Coast 2 Coast Run, Weston-super-Mare, news, product reviews, music & much more!
CONTENTS 03From the Archive 06Kickstart Scooter rally, 1957 style.
Welcome to the informative front section of Scootering, jam-packed full of useful stuff from news and reviews, products tested, opinions, readers’ letters, music reviews and plenty more besides.
24Win a Lambretta!
Competition to win a Lambretta GP200 worth £3200, plus OTR costs, insurance worth up to £250 AND take part in a Scootering magazine feature!
98Specialist Services
Planning your winter project or resto? Whatever you want, from platers to tuners, engineers to painters, fabricators to upholsterers, you’ll find them all here. Hopefully.
101Scooter Trader
Classified and business advertising, for all your scootering needs.
116Perfect 10
Who doesn’t like a Vespa GS? Well check out this subtly modified sweetie then.
28Block
– 130Hydro-graphics what’s it all about?
Exclusive – Inside 34 the Lambretta Innocenti Twin
Show Us Your 138Scoots!
In ya face Lambretta street racer inspired by Ken Block, rally driver with the Hoonigan Racing Division (dark glasses advised!).
Scootering was granted an exclusive look inside Experiment 137, Innocenti’s planned Super Scooter of the 1960s, to see what made it tick so sweetly!
4210 Vespa Upgrades
Things we’ve done to our poor guinea pig PX200 to keep the ride sweet!
46Targa
More twin action – a stunning Series 2 Lambretta with a modern Targa Twin engine, DDK paintjob and loadsa gadgets.
52Club do’s & events 54Coast to Coast Run
We take a close look at the latest customising craze about to sweep the scooter scene.
130
Your pictures of your rides that we publish.
140Vespa PS240
Another stunning Vespa from Hamburg, full of trick bits, a monster engine and a gloriously black paint job.
146Into The Sunset
Your scootering tales from long ago. Keep them coming please folks, we need to replenish our stock!
A calendar of scooter related events
The LCGB’s scenic ride across the north of England.
Lambretta 60Rimini Centre Open Day
Raising the bar for fun at scooter shops.
68Weston-super-Mare Rally Fun and frolics during the bank holiday.
72WSM Tattoos
Did you expose inked flesh for Iggy’s camera over the weekend?
Exclusive! 88The Game Changer
Scootering gets the first ride on the Casa Lambretta BSG 305 Lambretta. It’s amazing!
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140
Next Month!
Another exclusive as we ride and compare Innocenti’s proposed Super Lambrettas of the 60s – the twin cylinder 200s. We’ve been riding a 4-wheel Quadro scooter too, which was strange! Richie hopefully gets his Rat Rod Vespa on the road, we have an Insane Vespa GTS-powered Lambretta custom to drool over, loads of touring tips for those going away this summer, probably another competition to win brilliant stuff, and lots more besides!
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Every now and then a scooter comes out with a race-style paintjob you cannot get out of your mind, and just seems to fit the canvas.The Lambretta you see here, owned by Sean ‘Peggy’ Pedelty, has one such vivid covering.
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or me there have been several over the years; Dexters, Stinger, Bass Ale, Chewits… the list goes on. And now I’m adding this one to it. Sean actually owned this scooter quite a few years back, but had to sell it to finance the building of his other custom Skullduggery (the GP, not the skull-encrusted 1980s chop!). Eventually, like a loveable homing pigeon, it flew back into his life and he had the opportunity to regain ownership. Sadly by this stage it was now in quite a poor state. It stayed in this condition in the corner of his underground garage for a couple of years, then over a few pints a plan was hatched to build the ultimate street racer. Along with his good mate Damon of Southern Area Scooter Services, Sean came up with an idea to base a street racer custom on the phenomenon that is Ken Block and his associated race team. Ken Block is a professional rally driver with the Hoonigan Racing Division, formerly known as the Monster World Rally Team. He is also one of the co-founders of the trainer brand DC Shoes. Known worldwide as a complete adrenaline junkie, he has competed in many action sports events including skateboarding, snowboarding, motocross and has also featured on various high intensity automotive TV programmes.
EXPERIMENT 137 INSIDE THE INNOCENTI LAMBRETTA TWIN Experiment 137 was Innocenti’s project to win the arms race with Piaggio’s Vespa once and for all. The 200cc twin is more than a myth. Two factory prototypes still exist and are in the care of Vittorio Tessera. Now, finally, we can reveal to Scootering readers what makes them sing… E X P E R I - M E N TA L Of the two surviving members of Experiment 137, it is Chassis No.10 which is better known. This scooter, with alloy cylinders, was taken to the first EuroLambretta in Strasbourg in 1989 and we tested it in Scootering #142. Meanwhile the iron-barrelled prototype (engine N5 and chassis number 11) was stripped in the 1990s and its engine was sent for a rebuild that never fully materialised. Subsequently the engine and chassis were reunited and Vittorio sent them to Rimini Lambretta Centre for a ‘conserved restoration’ in 2014. As part of that work, the engine required a rebuild. As luck would have it Scootering was on hand with a camera when it came apart for the first time in 40 years.
While the twin project was rumoured to have been initiated in 1965, drawings for the overall engine layout weren’t produced until September 1966. Ugo Malter was the engineer in charge of the project, bringing his contemporary two-stroke tuning expertise from kart world champions Parilla to the house of Innocenti. Malter’s immediate bosses did not have any faith in the twin cylinder project so they left him to get on with designing it largely on his own. We interviewed Ugo for an article in Scootering #277 about Tino Sacchi’s Targa Twin engine; which is derived from Ugo’s original designs.
For a Lambretta nut, opening the prototype twin engine is like Christmas.
C A S T I RO N G UA R A N T E E The most obvious difference on the N5 engine is that the cylinders are cast iron as opposed to aluminium on the later version. Cast iron will presumably have been Innocenti’s preferred construction method, not only for reasons of cost, but also due to
their considerable expertise in manufacturing cast iron barrels. For a fan-cooled twin though, iron was perhaps not the best option due to asymmetric cooling. The left hand barrel gets cool air direct from the fan while the
right hand cylinder only gets cooled by warmer air coming from the first barrel. It’s not an ideal system, but that never stopped Harley-Davidson producing air-cooled bikes whose rear cylinder only ever receives second-hand cooling air.
ENGINE CASING
Above left: Sand-cast prototype engine N5. Above middle: The shaft-to-shaft distance is reduced on this motor. Above right: The right-hand main bearing and oil seal are contained within a removable casting.
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BSRA Scooter Rally WESTON-SUPER-MARE
Changes to the BSRA calendar meant we were heading down to bandit country for the SouthWest Scooter Clubs’Weston-Super-Mare rally earlier than usual – the May Day weekend.
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sunny Friday morning awaited our club rendezvous ready for the road trip, and after a quick blast down the M1 we soon got to our next meeting point, Tamworth Services, to meet a few more friends. By now we were 14 scooters strong and ready for a quick gentleman’s lunch (ladies invited themselves as well) near Tewkesbury, before knocking out the last 70 motorway miles. With no problems, other than one dead Lambretta jet and a few miles of extreme filtering, we made good time and arrived mid afternoon.
68 | SCOOTERING | JUNE 2015
Having checked in to our 1970s themed B&B (so authentically aged, dark, depressing and shoddy I don’t know how they managed it) we were ready to hit the streets. Weston is a great little town with a good selection of bars, a decent venue, an enclosed camp site, and even the Lambretta museum, so there’s everything you need to host a national rally. After a few swift drinks we managed to get stuck to the nicely patterned carpet in Wetherspoons before eventually freeing ourselves and heading up to the Winter Gardens for the do.
IGGY’S WESTON IN NUMBERS Miles ridden: 331 Scooters travelling with us: 14 Litres of fuel used (Lambretta S1 200): 31.88 Cost of fuel: £40.87 MPG: 47.2 Oil used: 1.2 litres Terminal Mansfield Monsters breakdowns: 3 (Lambrettas) Club B&B bill: £1280
Friday night was not the busiest, emptying further after he band finished, so the bar was easy to negotiate. As often happens, there was much nattering and then before long the lights came on and me and the other half were kidnapped and taken off to a friend’s hotel room for an even later after show party. Like all good reporters we made our excuses and left when the male half of the couple decided to shower at 5am, while we were still there. Very strange behaviour… Saturday wasn’t quite as nice as the previous day, both internally (hangover) and externally (a bit moist) but it wasn’t as bad as the forecasters warned us about and I rode up to the camp site without getting wet. The site itself wasn’t as busy as usual, the earlier date meant more people had gone for the B&B option this year but there were still more than enough campers, traders and day-trippers. The open-air ridden custom show was well supported, with a good variety of machines on display. Best in show went to the stunning Lambretta, Start Me Up, owned by Essex-based Mark Swinge. It gets ridden everywhere and his OCD cleaning regime means it still looks as good as it did when it picked up its first trophy. At Weston the scooter collected its 100th, award, a fantastic and well deserved achievement. Chatting to people around the site it made me realise that scooterists really are getting older. One was on about deep vein thrombosis after a flight back from Vegas when another friend limped up and started chatting about his forthcoming hip operation. Then I bumped into another who had a rear disc brake shear off and lock up on his Lammy on the way down. He managed to keep the scooter upright but stamped his foot down hard
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HYDRO-GRAPHICS WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
Do you feel the need for a splash of colour or an intricate pattern on your ride? In that case, hydro-graphics could be the answer. There are even kits to do it at home, but how easy is it? John Knott from JK Coatings explains to Sticky about the complexities of hydro coating and the difficulties of getting a good double-dip.
For patterning complex shapes there simply isn’t a better coating process than hydro-graphics.
HYDRO-WHAT?
Hydro-graphics is a method of ink transfer onto solid objects. Unlike vinyl wrapping no film is added to the base material. Instead the film dissolves so there is no significant increase in surface thickness. Literally the only thing added to the base coat is a layer of ink, transferred from a film floated onto the surface of a body of water. The exact origins of the process are uncertain but it was first patented in 1982 by a Japanese firm. Following the expiry of the patent after its 25-year validity, use of this process has exploded. Firms in Japan and China still produce the bulk of hydro films used around the world.
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES?
One of the chief advantages of hydrographics is the way the inked designs can be made to wrap around uneven surfaces and oddly shaped objects. For instance, if you wanted a design printing onto a complex part like a scooter horn grille, then hydrographics would allow the pattern to stretch into all the nooks and crannies of the object. The pattern will fill places that vinyl wrapping or even an airbrush artist would struggle to reach. The other key advantage is the vibrancy and detail possible in the design. If you wanted to pay for an airbrush artist to cover a bike in multi-coloured Paisley pattern then you’d better have a few quid to spend. It would be possible to do something like that in vinyl wrap, but again the results are not going to work so well on intricate parts and the finished result is dependent on having a high enough resolution image to work from. Another massive plus for dipping is the price. JK Coatings charges only £20 to coat a rear hub, or £140 for a pair of side panels.
DOWN-SIDES OF HYDRO-GRAPHICS
To my mind the biggest down-side of hydrographics at the moment is the choice of designs available. While new ones are being launched all the time you are still largely restricted to pre-prepared patterns, rather than being able to have bespoke designs as you can with vinyl or airbrushing. Think of it like going to a tattooist where you can only get inked with designs from the book. It is possible to get custom films produced, but at the moment there are long lead times for this and producers usually require quite substantial orders. If you want something unique on your scooter then you are probably better off with another method of customising. Finally, the finished result of hydrodipping is as dependent on the underlying surface preparation as much as any other coating process; perhaps more so because the ink has no inherent thickness.
Above left: A range of ‘speed shapes’ demonstrate the types of pattern available. Above right: This design on your panels via hydro-graphics would cost around £70 per side. Basically, if you dip a scratched part then you end up with a scratched part with a pattern on it. If you want a perfect job then you – or your dipper – will have to prepare the surface as well as if it was to be painted.
HOW IT WORKS
My first surprise was that John paints and prepares everything before he dips. The parts are sprayed in advance to ensure both the compatibility of the base surface and also the correct look of the finished item. As with any printing process, the colour of the base material affects the visibility of the design, so for vibrant coloured patterns white is often the best base coat. For carbon fibre patterns black often works well. John has tried many combinations so he can advise on what works well.
Step 1 is to pick the film pattern. Given that hydro-dipping is relatively cheap, and no artists are involved, then there are opportunities for overdoing the effect by maybe mixing too many styles and patterns. Unless you are trying to depict an explosion in a wallpaper factory then it’s probably better to stick to just one or two designs per scooter. Gok Wan would probably suggest avoiding classic couture disasters like mixing spots and stripes, but taste is a personal thing. John’s advice is also to make sure that the size of the pattern suits the size of the item. Small parts coated in large graphics simply look like splashes of colour, while small patterns like carbon fibre would simply get lost on a large panel when viewed from any distance.
Step 2 is to prepare the part for painting and give it a few coats of base colour. For best results the surface must be perfectly clean and smooth. Depending on the size of part and the chosen base colour, John either sprays with a gun or for smaller items he uses rattle cans of special hydro-friendly cellulose paints. Even if your paintwork already has the correct colour, John prefers to repaint it to ensure compatibility, however if the base colour is fine then it is possible to simply add an extra layer of compatible lacquer and to then dip directly onto that. “Hydro films don’t like to be dipped onto two-pack paints because the surface is really hard,” John explained. “If someone wants a two-pack surface coating then we have to dip onto it within an hour of painting.” New paints are being developed all the time to suit hydro-dipping, including twopack coatings with a six month dip window, and cellulose paints that can be dipped onto after less than five minutes’ drying time. It is possible to coat bare plastic parts, but John first sprays them with an etch primer, then a two-pack primer and finally a base colour before dipping. Step 3 is to plan the dip. While hydro-dipping offers an amazing ability to take a pattern into nooks and crannies, equally it will not perform miracles. For instance you cannot coat both the inside and outside of a pair of legshields in a single dip. Instead the piece may need to be ‘double dipped’ in a way that may confuse anyone who has worked within the porn industry. Double dipping, in the case of hydrographics, requires part of the component to
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Vespa PS240
Clean lines, monotone finishes and in-yourface modifications have turned this lowly PXbased machine into one of the most stunning street racer Vespas I’ve ever clapped eyes on. This is one mean looking scooter and if you don’t appreciate both the work that went into creating it and its understated beauty, then you surely have no pulse.
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lthough it pains me to say it, the Germans are light years ahead of the UK when it comes to trick parts and well-finished street racers, especially on the Vespa side of the fence, so it’s no surprise that this one came from Hamburg based Vespa specialist Scooter & Service. In fact this is S&S owner Wolfgang ‘Wolle’ Riehn’s own scooter, built not just as a tool to show what the shop is capable of and showcase many of their specialist parts (like the race seat fuel tank for instance) and tuning know-how, but also as his own personal scooter. As with most German creations this isn’t simply a good-looking scooter though, it can also shift a bit, thanks to the extensively tuned and modified engine. 41bhp from a Vespa is an obscene power figure, but I like it! That power is thanks to a 180 Rally crankcase – with a bolt-on adaptor to avoid welding – running a liquid-cooled 250cc cylinder kit usually found on a Swedish enduro bike. That Husqvarna top end sits on a 62.5mm Mazzucchelli crank with eccentric pin, tungsten inserts and a one-off CNC machined conrod. It slurps a liquid diet of intravenously fed fuel through a 35mm Keihin carb then throws out the remnants via the exquisite one-off exhaust system; a 40 piece stainless steel jigsaw puzzle, complete with Scooter & Service noise reduction system and a programmable exhaust valve. Trick or what?
Show us your scoots Jay’s Vespa’s topbox complete with his free Scootering stickers from the March 2015 edition of the magazine.
Chloe on guard duty, Dave Towers from Harrogate Scooter Scene.
This is Steve Osborne’s self-restored 1961 Lambretta Li 125 scooter.
Ray Mclaughlan and his Vespa 150 Super.
Ray Lyddon sent this wonderful photo of his then girlfriend Margaret, aged 17, Scooter Queen of 1960. They were married in 1963. Ray says: “We travelled many thousands of miles on the Lambrettas between 1958 and 1964, but then ‘babies’ arrived and we bought a Sunbeam Alpine. It’s a pity we could not keep the ‘Lambo’ as well.
Sarah sent us this photo of her wedding in November 2013, looking forward to their second anniversary later this year!
Martin Rive from the Isle of Sheppey Kent is the chap behind this recently restored series 1 Framebreather with a few modifications. A panel-beater and paint sprayer by trade he does all the work himself, as he also did on his Series 3 Li125.