March 2013 Archives

I live in the San Francisco bay area, and there are a lot of interesting people that live nearby. One of my friends works at Pixar. It seems that Pixar is working on some sort of animation that will have a scooter in it. One of their sound engineers was looking to find the sound of a vintage scooter for their project. My friend sent him my way. So he came by my house this morning to record some scooter sounds.

I ride a scooter every day, but I don't often ride different ones side-by-side. I had my PX200 out, and the SX200 that I have been working on as well. The thing that was most surprising to me was that the Vespa was much louder than the Lambretta. Honestly, the Lambretta was very quiet. What a nice scooter!

Cool period photo of some kids at a Vespa display stand. It could be at a car show or a motorcycle show. Note the sidecar box on the scooter they are sitting on.  The scooters behind them have some nice accessories.  Also, you can just see the back of an Ape delivery truck in the background on the left.

I'm thinking this is a Lambretta LC? This is a very odd ad. The model is impossibly thin, the clothes look crazy, just check out her waist!

So this just arrived on my doorstep. Thank you Bellomoto! I currently have a silver P, but I prefer the black. Soon my silver girl will be sold and gone, and this mistress will take her place. First things first though, I also have a shiny new SIP road exhaust to install before she gets rolling. I will post the details of that installation when I finally get some time in the garage.

Yeah! I like the chuzpah! If you are going to roll Viet-bodge, wear it proudly. I love the bent wheel rim, by the way.

Keeping with the theme of scooter videos, here is another one I like. This video is (obviously) from Germany. I think we scooterists can all relate to Dennis, the builder of this scoot. Lots of little details go into each of our scoots. Things that only we may appreciate, or even notice. As he said at the end, "I would never sell it, that is my thing, that is my baby..." Yeah, exactly right...

Some nice fellas down Louisiana way are going for broke, and doing a full web TV show about scooters. Well, I guess it is more about them riding scooters and having misadventures, but still, it is damn cool. This is the sort of thing I'd do if I had some equipment and the time to make it all happen. I love it. Check out the latest episode, where they go to Amerivespa. These guys bought a bus as a scooter hauler! How cool/crazy is that?!

Should you find yourself living in the U.S. Virgin Islands, I would suggest you bid on this Rally 200 that is currently for sale on ebay. For the rest of us, I highlight this listing because it shows off a detail that only us scooter nerds would find interesting. The rear frame badge.

The Rally 200's were pretty similar throughout the 70's, but they differed in the small details. Here in the US, we got different switches and electrical systems, with at least three different versions. Maddeningly, none of them were the same as the European models, so spare parts for them are hard to find.

While the Euro models were much simpler with their electrics, they did get the (in my opinion) ugly large headlights. Sure, it is nice to see in the dark, but at what price... at what price!?

Now to the issue at hand here. The rear frame badge on this Rally is different from most of the later badges. Notice that the letters are all capital, compare that with the later badges, which have lower case letters. Also, the font is different from the later badges. I'm not sure how long these badges were used, but it must have only been the first group of the 200's that Piaggio made. I have only rarely seen these badges, and none of the US market scooters had them.