The Vespa Engine scares me

Okay, so I only got this ride cuz someone else blew up the engine. And then someone else couldn't fix it. And now I think I can fix it and make it run. But it's missing everything electrical. And it has cracks in the aluminum housing. And its all rusted and nasty looking. Holy crap I am so screwed. Calm down. Breath. Buy a Vespa manual and sleep with it every night for 3 months figuring it all out in your head!

It was sorta like that. A lot of trial and error. Cleaning parts, figuring out where it went in the jigsaw puzzle. I had no assembled version to compare to other than my trusty manual. I made a list of parts, ordred them from ScooterMD in Vancouver and got at it. I needed some aluminum welding and ProMetal did that for me. The original head was shot so I ordered a new 3 port head and piston. But that meant some more aluminum welding and then filing out and polishing of the the new 3rd port. A hot rod Vespa! Up from the original 4.5 HP to probably 6 or 7! Woohoo!

All the bearing needed replacing. That involved freezing the bearing and heating the casing. Hard work. I also had to extensively de-varnish and clean the rotary valve for fuel that also moves the piston. The kickstart pinion was broken so I replaced it, along with every seal. New kick start pedal, cleaned all the transmission gears, fixed the pinion and cross thingy that selects the gears. Rebuilt the clutch, new brakes, cleaned the drums, changed out the flywheel and added the new elements for the EVIL FRAKKING ELECTRONIC IGNITION! See next post. Grrrrrrr.

In the end, the engine was a polished aluminum beauty! Ready to run! I hope. And Pray. And worry far too much about.

Weld, Putty, Paint

Things get a bit non-linear here. The Vespa got worked on a little bit every year after the initial frenzy in 2004 but life got in the way a fair bit. I took up Kung Fu. I changed girl friends a few times; I fell in love and had my heart broken. The Vespa was patient, knowing I would come back to her. I lost 20 pounds. I made tiramisu. I painted. I played Guitar. I renovated my old house. I think I have creative deficit disorder and the Vespa became another great unfinished project. I would work on it whenever I had time, parts and had gotten tired of talking about working on it. My friend shave such patience with me its ridonkulous as my daughter would say.

So I will talk about the body of the Vespa. Once stripped it needed some serious body work including structural welding, metal pan replacement in parts, much dolly/hammering and a few pounds of strategically placed filler. Sort of like Madonna. In fact, a LOT like Madonna. I did some myself, paid a bodyshop to do the welding and then got buddy Jim, the Harley fanatic, to do the rest of the filler/primer. The vespa body than sat awaiting the dry build to make sure all the parts fit before final paint and assembly. It lived mainly in my porch and then a stint for a year or so in Barb's garage.

Still inanimate, the ugly duckling (make that the dead, dissected and horribly disfigured ugly duckling) was starting to look like the sexy lady she used to be! Sophia Loren reincarnated! If she was dead that is. She is alive still isn't she?

The things you learn that no one tells you

Sometime the simplest things are the hardest. For example, when I was stripping off the old paint it came time to work on the front fender, which was still attached to the front fork assembly. Did you know that Vespas are cool because the aircraft engineer who designed them hated how hard it was to change a tire on a motorcycle? Have a look... the tire is entirely open on one side in the front and back, making changing the tire as easy as a car. And why yes, the front fork IS designed just like an airplane strut.

Ooops. ADHD kicking in again. Where was I... Okay, so in order to remove the fork assembly you have to loosen two nuts that ring the threaded fork at the top. They require a special tool as they are slotted about every 45 degrees and are other wise smooth rings that any normal wrench has nothing to grab onto. I managed to McGyver it with a hammer and flathead screwdriver. Hey, it worked. My reward was to watch about 27 small ball bearing skip across the floor and down into the chassis as I removed the ring that held them in place. Frak. I then pulled the fork out and was rewarded with the site of about 16 larger ball bearings from the lower bearing tray chasing the smaller ones that had previously escaped. FRAK FRAK FRAK. Add to list of things to buy. At least the fork was free! Long live the fork!

So, I had unbolted the fender from the fork assembly and for the life of me I could not get it to come off the fork. I stared at it and wiggled it this way and that but there was NO damn way it would fit over the little ball bearing trough around the bottom of the fork column. It was impossible. That should have been my hint. Many days later it struck me....Duh. The little trough appeared to be part of the fork but actually was just a tight fitted ring around it. Some gentle hammering and it came off and the fender was FREE! I peed a little! See photo. I think I heard it giggle with glee. Or maybe it was the paint stripper fumes again. And then I passed out.

Thud.

"We can rebuild her"

I spent a fair bit of time in 2004 just figuring out what was missing, what needed to be replaced and where might I find all of this stuff. Luckily for me, Vespa made about 100 Million scooters. Unlucky for me, they are all different and lived far away in lands filled with exotic cheeses, meats and women. I also inhaled a very large amount of paint stripper. On the internet, ther eare many site sthat talk about the miracle of "acid dipping" a scooter to remove all old paint and leave a nice shiny metal object. Like in the Terminator. We don't have those here. I spent many hours in my porch (now my Vespa garage) inhaling toxic fumes and noting how the fluid ate everything it touched but only made my flesh feel cool where it touched. Odd. And then I fainted. This was around August, 2004.

Well, it was a LOT of work but now I was INVESTED in the project with my heart and soul. As I turned to the engine and parts I was also about to get much more financially invested. Wah.

The Vespa is DEAD! DEAD I tell you! D-E-A-D!!!!

I neglected to tell you, the viewing audience, that this adventure began in June of 2004.

You may have noticed in the previous post that my new 'ride' was missing a seat. And a rear tire. And paint. And an engine. The good news was I had a lot of parts in a box. The bad news was I had A LOT of parts in a box and how they got there was more of a body bag situation than a nice cubic storage solution.

The history as I know it. Somehow, this rare German bird found its way to Calgary. I suspect someone posted in Germany fell in love with the scooter and brought it back with them. I like to imagine it winging its way across the Atlantic in a big military transport. Smuggled of course.

So whoever this fella was, he drove it down a long hill coasting. Bad mistake in a two stroke that relies on oil in the fuel to lubricate the engine. The engine seized, someone swore and the Vespa was now an inanimate object. The owner evidently had tired of his Two-Wheeled Fraulein and told the kids next door they could have it if they wanted to try a hand at fixing it. "Yay" they said with unbridled teenage enthusiasm quickly followed by a frenzy of dismantlement using Dad's socket set and tools.

As any of you Vespa folks out there know, the Vespa may be of proud Italian heritage but the inside of a Vespa engine/transmission would make a Swiss Watchmaker proud. It's a brilliant and compact design but it's not obvious to a acne plagued teen what the heck is going on in there and 20 years ago there were not a lot of vintage Vespa dealers in western Canada (i.e. NONE) and the Internet was still limited to porn being shared between nuclear physicists. I would estimate they spent a few days tearing it apart looking for something with the word "broken, please replace" written on it and then gave up when they realized they were truly frakked in this little restoration experiment. At this point they threw it all in a box (Thank you!) and left it all outside in the back yard for the next decade or so (Oops).

The Vespa was dead, Its heart torn out and dissected. Oxidation set in. The aluminum parts began to grow crystalline beards. The plastics bits rotted in the sun and seasons. It appears a few generations of style appreciating mice lived and died in the area where the fuel tank once sat. Stuff got lost or carried away by crows.

The Vespa was dead.

What the hell was I thinking

Why do I own and work on a vintage Vespa? It's not a simple question. Here is one answer:

Part 1: I fell in love with this Italian gal from Ottawa. She was great. Her family was great. I ate rabbit, risotto and biscotti. I drank grappa, prosecco and merlot. I traveled Northern Italy and fell in love with all things Italian. Things like classic big sexy fat ass 'Wasp' Vespa scooters.

Part2: I love mechanical things. I have owned and restored a 1939 Chev 2 door, a 1969 BMW 2002, a 1961 Valiant (with a 340 dropped in for fun). I have raced stock cars. I have spent a fair bit of time and money on things that go vroom vroom. I just like tinkering and fixing things so they work again.

Part 3: I got a divorce, have a small garage, little money for fancy cars and a somewhat keener sense of what burning petroleum does to ice-fields far far away and why I should care.

1+2+3 = "Wouldn't it be cool to get an old vespa and fix it up.

This is all slightly insane as I though this long before the Vespa craze and there are NO old Vespa's within a day's drive of where I live in the middle of Saskatchewan, Canada. But I started looking and one day while talking to my brother in Calgary about my quest his cubicle neighbor overheard our discussion and said he had an old Vespa for sale...cheap.

I was about to learn that "Old Vespa" and "Cheap" are not often used in the same sentence together. But that's another post. I HAD MY VESPA! A 1959 VEspa T/4. Manufactured in Augsburg , Germany. A rare model as it was an old large frame with 150cc and a 4 speed (like a VBB) but it had more stable 10" rims, a gooseneck taillight and just enough other odd little differences to make it quite unique in North America. The Augsburg factory was noted for its high quality product.

The owner said he thought he had most the parts and we agreed to the 100$ price. A few weeks later my brother hauled it to Regina in the back of his Nisaan 300Z (Yes, you read that correctly). My lucky find had found its new home!