The trouble with.....

ASIAN VESPA AND LAMBRETTA RESTORATIONS.

By Sam Schembri-Portland

Disclaimer: There may be some dealers out there doing things right, they are very very rare. If they're doing it right (not stuffing up a classic by modernising and restoring it to death!!) they have nothing to hide or be worried about. This is about all the others, the crooks, the chop shop owners, the people taking upwards of $4000 or $5000 of your hard saved money for a bucket of crud you will never be able to register in this country.

Never before has the old saying "Buyer Beware" had more significance for the modern day scooterist.

If you've been involved in the booming scooter industry or keen on old scooters at all, you would have heard all about the thousands of scooters sold all around the world each year which start their new lives in sweaty Asian chop shops.

Of course there may be some good ones out there, but I'm yet to find one. I am referring to the many many hundreds of 'dealers' who are set up to rip people off for as long as they can before being shut down.

The aim of their game is to find the cheapest scooters they can, remove all the lovely original, (but usually pitted and dull looking) parts and replace them with poorly chromed and badly made parts that they think 'Westerners' would like to see on the old scooters. They add home made shims where they need to in order to make parts fit without rattling and if a good coke can shim won't fix it then they have learned that epoxy resin will! Believe me I've seen it all & have photos to prove it.

If you don't have access to "O" rings you can simply make them out of some cotton and electrical tape!

So, this is how the story unfolds all over the world.

A person spots an old Vespa or Lambretta online and falls in love with it.......thats's fair enough-who wouldn't?

They check it out from all angles and all 14 photos, looks good, it has a great write up by someone who sounds like they know what they are talking about so that gives them some confidence.

They search online and find that other scooters are fetching similar prices all over the world so they decide to think about it some more.

That night they can't get to sleep as they think about how cool it will be to pull up at the coffee shop and watch all the heads turn to check out the old scooter and it's cool rider!

The next day they check it out again, notice someone else is bidding and as they have pictured themselves on it already, riding through the streets with the warm summer air on their face they decide there and then to buy it.

A few weeks and a bit of extra cash later the crate arrives at the port, yipppeeee. They rush down and pay all the appropriate fees to all and sundry, organise to get the crate home, dreaming of their first sidewalk macchiato.

After all the unpacking and admiring from afar it's time to start her up, or at least try to!

This is the step where people start to realise what they've bought into the country and where I usually get all my business from.

Sometimes they'll be lucky and get going for the time being. That might be for 10kms, 100kms or even 1000kms but when things go wrong and they finally have to drop and open the engine they discover things that make their hair curl!

On investigation, one of the very first things they hear from the so called 'people in the know' is ...'can't help you-sorry.'

Most shops just won't touch Asian restored scooters. There's probably some legal reason why Vespa shops won't touch them. This has got to be the single biggest warning sign of all when doing your purchasing homework. When you ring the bigger Vespa shops in the country and ask "Can you service my old Vespa?" , one of the very first questions they'll ask is where is it from? I'm almost 100% sure they all give you the same answer.

So what do you do if you've bought an Asian restored Vespa and it won't go?

Simple.....EMAIL ME NOW!

I've been there, done that- been caught out and trying to stop the same thing happening to others.

We should be able to get you going again and well enough to pass your roadworthy test safely which is our goal of course.

You can also look at this phenomenon from another angle completely.

This is the scenario I am personally fighting against. Essentially, every single old Vespa or Lambretta coming out of Asia has been 'restored to death'. Despite the restorers thinking they are selling an old scooter to someone to use as transport, in actual fact they've done the opposite. They are modifying them so heavily or the work is of such a poor standard that the new owners dreams of riding a classic scooter to the cafes will never be realised without first having to spend much more hard earned cash on it.