Scootering October 2016 preview

AR SPECTACUL

SPECIAL 10-PAGE HT ISLE OF WIGRT T RALLY REPO

Candy

paint jobs: all you need to know

Chris Pope & The Chords UK

interview

#364 October 2016

FEATURE INSIDE

ADOR RED

Magnificent Stone Roses

PLUS

custom Lambretta

NEW VESPA

TUNING

& UPGRADES

MEGA-FEATURE!

TV175 CRIME SCENE LAMBRETTA EXCLUSIVE

Blackpool Lambretta Owners Club ■ Stu Owen – essential maintenance ■ Rally report: Mersea Island ■ Weston on Trent ■ York SC Breighton Ferry ■ Sidewinders ■ BSSO race reports ■ Events Guide ■ Scooter Trader and more…

CONTENTS 03Letter from the editor

108Tech Torque

06

114Tech Torque

A warm welcome to October Scootering.

Kickstart

The front section with latest news, views and product reviews!

14Adored – custom scooter Beautiful Stone Roses custom Lambretta.

22

Rally report

BSRA – Isle of Wight – 10 page special feature.

Dan starts the new and ongoing Vespa tuning and upgrades section – this month kicks off with PX125 exhaust upgrades.

118Tech Torque

Bang for Buck tuning: Part 6 of the SIL200 tuning developments – this month long-stroking the Lambretta.

33Letters

sprinting 121Scooter enters a new era

34Rally report

125BSSO 2016 #7

47Dealer spotlight

131Scooter Trader

Feedback and full throttle responses from the readers.

Weston on Trent – Stan’s wet WOT rally report.

This month we look at the ‘Ultimate’ dealer – CamLam.

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Stu Owen looks at cable routing and set-ups in this month’s Essential Maintenance.

Darrell Taylor on sprinting shenanigans.

Thrills and spills at Croft – plus Petrol & Pistons report.

Your sales and classifieds section – including Specialist Services & at a glance.

52Crime Lord – custom scooter 144An interview with Chris Pope 58Painting by numbers Into The Sunset 146 66Show us your scooters In or out of the ring, this beast is a knockout.

Part 6 of our paintjob guide – like taking candy from a baby!

The best of the rest from readers’ stunning rides.

Nik speaks to Chris Pope, former guitarist and song writer with The Chords.

Another amusing scooter story from the past.

70Club Focus The bag snatcher and 73the brunette

Blackpool Lambretta Owners Club.

Christian Giarrizzo delves into the murky past of a TV175 getaway vehicle.

78Club Do’s & Events

Your essential guide to the scene – What, Where & When!

95Scootering Words & Sounds The best of words and music as reviewed by Nik & Sarge.

98Brighton Mod Weekender Sarge reports on one special weekend.

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Rattling around the garage

This month Bodger gets himself very worked up and angry about the thought of scooter rallies full of cars. Read his ill-tempered rant at your own peril…

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here’s a phrase which has recently crept into circulation in the scootering world, and it’s annoying the hell out of me. It’s not a big one, and at first glance it seems innocent enough, but when you stop and think about it, it strikes at the heart of what many of us still understand our little world to be. The phrase? “It’s all about the scene”. There I’ve said it. Now I feel soiled.

To many people that’s just a phrase, like ‘keep the faith’ or ‘once a Mod, always a Mod’, but when you stop and think about it, it’s actually quite insulting to a lot of us. It suggests that the actual scooter itself isn’t a necessary part of attending a scooter rally, it’s more important to get there by whatever means possible?

Now, before you all start reaching for pen and paper (use email, it’s quicker!)

I appreciate that not everyone can ride to a rally, some for perfectly acceptable reasons. We’ve mainly left our teens in the distant past, and some of us might not be physically capable of riding the miles needed. I get that. No argument, park your car next to me anytime.

The other popular excuse is that they need to bring the family with them. Now, this is where I start to struggle and I must admit that I’ve never really been convinced by this. If the other half is so much into scooters, then surely they should be riding too, and I’ve never accepted the scooter rally scene to be a place for children and never will.

Given what me and my pals get up to at rallies, I’d not expose either of my kids to the alcoholic misbehaviour of my club, amid a constant barrage of obscenities and chain smoking. It’s fun for us, but not a great example for them… not that I’m suggesting everyone behaves like us.

All that aside, the concept of ‘It’s all about the scene’ is inherently flawed.

Without scooters, there would be no scene… the scooters ARE the scene. If everyone turned up in a car or camper van, would it still be a scooter rally, or

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Bodger wasn’t happy with the queue to get into this month’s National...

would the penny finally drop that this whole ‘get there by any means’ concept has messed it up for everyone? Somehow I doubt it. As long as they could pull their patch covered jacket off the parcel shelf, put on their hat and boots and wander around like they own the place, they won’t care. And there’s nothing anyone can do about this. Or is there?

Well…. I hate to admit it, but for once I don’t have any ideas for a solution other than trying to attend rallies that actively discourage other forms of transport. Sadly those are few and far between, and even then I’ve heard of scooters being pulled out of vans a few miles from strictly scooter events, which, although within the letter of the event, misses the spirit of the event by a country mile.

All I know is that I’ll keep riding for as long as I can, it’s not ‘all about the scene’ at all, it’s actually ‘all about the scooters’.

The clue is in the title of the event…

Perhaps it’s time for some brave soul to

host a ‘scooterist rally’ – or ‘scootourist’ as a friend of mine christened them – where it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you’re seen to be there. Everyone can then park their motors in a car park, and hold competitions such as ‘Who has the most expensive transport’, ‘Who has the CD with the most predictable tracks’, the ‘Most original excuse’ and ‘Naffest scooter-related rear window sticker’ before sitting around reminiscing about the bad old days when people had the temerity to go to rallies on actual scooters.

To wrap up, I’ll leave you with this observation – always remember that no good rally story ever started with the words “Well, there we were, travelling to the rally in the car and…” Even if I get there, having stopped for petrol half a dozen times and mended three breakdowns, I’ll still have had more of an adventure than you can dream of.

Till next time.

Bodger

B S R A I S L E O F W I G H T I N T E R N AT I O N A L S C O O T E R R A L LY 2 0 1 6 : C U S T O M S H O W Eloise: Vespa Chop.

68 UYS: Rallymaster.

Y412 FVW PX125.

Black Bogey.

Nexx Carbon GP.

Bass Racer.

For Valour.

UTK 496L Rally 180.

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ll National Rally trophies are created equal, some are however more equal than others and the IOW is one of the rallies that always attracts a strong field. The current trend of classic customs being reborn continued here with Dazzle taking six trophies, including Best of Show. Of the other scooters present it’s hard to single out any individual entry over another but there was a beautiful selection of Model D Lambrettas ranging from original patina through candy green to racer. Although the metal roof made for a baking atmosphere at times, the hall was packed for most of the day with visitors drinking in the machines on display. Anyone who entered, let alone won a trophy, can hold their heads high.

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Lambretta Chopper Owners Club.

The Cam Lam team: Trevor, Peter, Jorg and Ian.

ULTIMATE CAMBRIDGE LAMBRETTA TRADE

Cambridge Lambretta Workshop or ‘Cam Lam’ as it’s better known, has a well-earned reputation for quality restorations and tuning. Scootering paid them a visit to see exactly what’s behind this well-known name.

“It all started in a caravan outside a council flat in Cambridge,” explains owner Trevor Peat. “With ‘Crazy’ Chris O’Connor I’d been attending rallies for a few years but in 1989 no-one down south was really that interested in scooters, it was mainly a northern thing. If you wanted to repair or rebuild a machine you had to do it yourself. After a few years I’d got a small business running and in 1995 I decided to try and make a go of it.

“In honesty I was in a very small market and it was more of a paying hobby. Over the years Jason Heard, Ben Frost and Ian Todd have all helped me to build up the business. I’m grateful to them all and particularly my lovely wife Susey who keeps the office side of things in order.”

Although Trevor is a man who exudes enthusiasm for his work (when telling stories he repeatedly uses the phrase ‘that was fun’) he’s quite modest with regards

to Cam Lam’s success. Earlier this year the company bought its own unit in St Ives, just outside Cambridge. Although Trevor describes it as a work in progress it would be the envy of many scooter shops around the world. From the tiled floor workshop through to an extensive spares holding and a well-stocked showroom there’s no doubt this is an operation that takes itself seriously.

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From humble beginnings

TLI G H

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Going online

Having established itself Cam Lam could have easily settled into a steady routine with a ready market for its restorations, examples of which can be found as far afield as the United States and Australia, but Trevor’s not that kind of person. “We’d been running as a professional business for a couple of years when a good friend told me that if we didn’t sell spares we weren’t really in the game. They were right and I’m proud to say that we were one of

Man behind the name, Trevor Peat.

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THE

KRAYS CRIME LORD LAMBRETTA

“I come here for a f***ing shootout, a proper shootout with some proper men, like Colonel Custer, like Geronimo” – Mad, bad, and dangerous to know… that pretty much sums up the Kray twins and this Crime Lord scooter brings that description to life.

Blackpool

Lambretta Owners Club EST 2002 “We’re going down Blackpool alright, we’re going down Blackpool for a pint, we’re going down Blackpool alright, to see the lights…” Blackers.

Love it or loathe it, it’s always crammed full of people having a good time at the seaside. The tower, the pleasure beach and the pier… all full with smiley-happy-tipsy-drunk people having fun.

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Great Yarmouth Sidewinders 40th Anniversary Rally

Sheer hard work, meticulous planning, and dedicated organisation (among other factors) are required to promote a scooter rally. Even with all those boxes ticked there’s no guarantee of success, thankfully this year Great Yarmouth proved to be a fantastic event…

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reat Yarmouth Sidewinders SC has been running a rally for the past three years. Prior to this year’s rally, 2016 marking the club’s 40th anniversary, for a variety of reasons, (weather conditions in the main), numbers were lower than hoped for at the last two. So this year was, literally, make or break as far as this regional was concerned. Great Yarmouth Racecourse is an ideal rally location and if memory serves at least once during the 80s, when LCGB was involved with running National rallies, the racecourse was utilised. Now, 30 plus years later, the racecourse is still an excellent host venue.

Several of the bars are located on various levels in the two grandstands and this ensured there was a variety of music on offer. With the addition of the outdoor stage, and five of the seven live acts performing al-fresco over the two days, late

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afternoon, and early evening, things shaped up nicely. Almost every taste in music was catered for from the live acts and DJs. On a personal note, I first encountered some of Great Yarmouth Sidewinders one Saturday at Arthur Francis’ shop in Watford, back in 1980, prior to Ray Kemp relocating to Yorkshire. Over the early years of the then fledgling National rallies, I’d invariably run into some of them. This being the Sidewinders’ 40th anniversary rally, for me personally this event was not to be missed.

My cross country route to Great Yarmouth has vastly changed since the 80s, in the main for the better, with dual carriageways and bypasses avoiding many of the towns and cities that in the past required riding through. Arriving at the Racecourse midafternoon on the Friday, the site was already buzzing with scooters and scooterists, with a steady amount arriving constantly throughout the late afternoon and evening. Near perfect weather

PJ Oakley SX200 Mk III Lambretta

Love at first sight was exactly what Vince Roberts experienced the first time he saw a PJ Oakley Mark III SX200 dealer special in the late 60s.

He did have a 1963 Li150 at the time, but when one of the older lads in Barrow turned up on an Oakley Mark III, Vince was smitten.

The memory has never left him…

I

t wasn’t just any Oakley Mark III he wanted, it was the very one that he first saw; to Vince it truly was a thing of beauty. During the 60s there were a handful of outlets that went a little bit further than most by offering their customers an enhanced version of a standard scooter. The Grimstead Hurricane, Rafferty Newman Wildcat, Ron Moss Supertune and Arthur Francis S-Type are well known and renowned.

Not as well-known as the aforementioned, yet equally as significant as all of them, was the dealer special offered by Leicester dealer PJ Oakley.

These are arguably the rarest of all the 60s dealer

specials to find, now nearly 50 years on from their first introduction. Based at 227a Melton Road, Oakley offered the basic version of his SX200 Mark III, which retailed at £249. The following extras constituted a standard Oakley Mark III: restyled two-tone paintwork to the customer’s specification, engine tuned to stage 1, high compression cylinder head, 12v conversion with 9 amp charge rate and switchable 6v magneto, Lucas 55W 12v quartz iodine spot-lamp, headlamp flasher and warning lamp on the headset, legshield glove-box, electronic rev counter, reverse pull front disc brake, ball end levers, front damper gaiters, side panel locks and

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T E RI N

OO

distance left/right from the bearing and try one of each of the four positions it can be fitted to as one is often better than the rest. The next issue is the oil seal plate gasket which, upon fitting the oil seal plate, must compress the gasket.

This can be checked before by measuring the rebate depth down to the bearing face then measuring the oil seal plate spigot and doing a quick calculation. You can find the dimension to be for example 0.4mm depth, so a 0.5mm gasket will be compressed okay but sometimes it’s around 0.8mm, meaning a 1mm gasket is required.

Alternatively, do a dummy build of the plate with a small blob of plasticine or similar to check the gasket is definitely being nipped or check for the gasket leaving the bearing maker’s name embossed into it if you fit the bearing that way up beforehand.

The plate was assembled and the gasket gave a guaranteed petrol resistant sealant around all surfaces where there’s a gap. After seeing many leak-down tests fail in this area, it’s worth the extra effort now rather than rebuild it again later.

The mag housing was rebuilt with new bearings and seals and the mag gasket replaced with one of an appropriate thickness to give an even clearance on the crank webs to casing.

One last item that’s really important – we found on our SIL test motor that the short crankcase studs which secure the mag housing were made of cheese so all three were replaced. With the motor built up, the top end was fitted again and more

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calculations were needed as the crank and rod length change throws up lots of things to reconsider that are not always obvious.

The top end’s previous set-up on the 58/107 crank was as follows: exhaust duration 188º, transfer duration 126º, inlet duration 149º and blowdown 31º.

If you built the motor on the 60/110 and adjusted the base gaskets and packers until the same squish clearance was achieved as before, it would be as follows: exhaust duration 193º, transfer duration 134º, inlet duration 145.5º and blowdown 29.24º. So a straight swap and build to this spec would not be a fair comparison of crank stroking.

Correction

On a 60 stroke, the piston travels an extra 1mm up and extra 1mm down than the 58. If you adjust the cylinder height so that the piston sits 1mm higher than it was previously, then it almost corrects the ex-duration to near what it was before, as it’s near the top of the crank’s swing. But the transfer duration doesn’t follow as close, because they sit lower down the bore and fall onto the larger swing of the crank’s stroke, so have a greater change comparatively. The inlet being nearer the bottom of the stroke again remains close to what it was on the 58 build.

So with the barrel height adjusted and piston sat 1mm higher than previous we get as close to previous figures as possible: exhaust duration 189º, transfer duration 129.5º, inlet duration 149.19º and blowdown 29.75º.

So what other changes occur as a result of stroking?

The previous 58 set-up was 198.43cc and the new 60 set up makes it 205.27cc so we now have a larger cubic capacity. This, along with the mild exhaust port duration change, now alters the compression ratio despite running the same squish clearance. On a 58 stroke it was 10.5-1 uncorrected tdc. and 6.07-1 corrected on a 60 stroke it becomes 10.87-1 uncorrected and 6.23-1 corrected.

With the 60 stroke and 110 rod we also add around 3mm of base packer so this increases the total crankcase volume by around 12cc, the length of the transfer duct is extended by 3mm, and the entry into the transfer feeds from the base of the crankcase will have a larger opening for the charge which resides below the piston crown to travel through.

The longer con rod length sits the piston crown higher in relation to the case so more volume is created below it also. Combined with a different angle it pushes the piston up the bore, changing the thrust applied to the piston faces. So with all these variables it’s difficult to attribute which one has provided any difference in performance, be it for better or worse.

To complete the build a replacement piston was to be used (another change) made by Wossner for AF Rayspeed at 66mm. They produced them for use in Rapido kits with the same crown profile but upon installing I found a surprise that these extra wide transfers on the SIL barrel meant that the bottom ring peg position was not able to be used, so decided to run it on a single ring until a replacement could be sourced (note: AF Rayspeed now has a new batch of 66 pistons with revised peg positions for use on kits that may be tuned with wide transfer ports).

So fully built and leak down tested, back in the chassis it was now time for its last dyno test. As you can see from the graphs, power and torque has gone up slightly and moved the power curve over to the left. This demonstrates an earlier low-down power delivery, but cropping a little at the end of the run again as was seen on the last compression increase.

The result is typical of what I see on the many occasions a change to longer stroke is applied along with the other variables that go hand in hand with this modification. The net effect is a small increase in power, delivered earlier.

That’s all for this month.

Words & Images: Darrell Taylor

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