Tonight on DIY Classic Rides....

[cphilip]

..they are starting a series on restoring a Vespa Sprint. I have done one of these myself so I am interested to see how they cover it and all. It seems difficult to cover this in four half hour episodes but I remain open minded. If anyone is interested its on at 9:30 EST. And repeats a few times as well. And there will be three more episodes of this series.

http://www.diynet.com/diy/ab_auto_restoration/article/0,2021,DIY_13680_3372578,00.html

There is a picture or two of the one I restored at my website cphilip.com. The pearl white one. Thats a 76 Sprint. The one they are using for the show is a 74 so they are sort of very similar models. This one I did took a good bit of work. It came out of a barn in Kentucky. Completely frozen up motor and badly two tone painted. But very solid becuase it had been put away long ago and not riden much. It took a complete engine rebuild and that pearl white paint job and all that sorta thing. But came out nice and we recently upkitted it to a 177cc from a 150cc.

[cphilip]

Meh.... skimmed over a lot of detail and started with a real cherry easy clean one to do... but still not bad. Just left a lot of little stuff out and its not as easy as it looked there most of time. Normaly your dealing with a lot more frozen rusted stuff than that.

[PyRo]

Normaly your dealing with a lot more frozen rusted stuff than that.
Which is why god blessed us with the torch :)

[cphilip]

Which is why god blessed us with the torch :)

Absolutely!!!! The torch, the Dremel and the Pentrating lube.... along with the dead blow hammer are all essential tools for real Vespa restoration.

Funny the producers insisted on a almost perfect easy Scooter to do the show with. So it would go faster and without any hitches. But this is not real world at all. The parts sponsor SCOMO and I do a lot of business together. I sell them stuff and visa versa. I have stuff up there on Consignment even now.

The so called "Expert Vespa Restorer" they use... no one seems to know him at all. He appears to be knowledgable and SCOMO tells me he is in Tennessee... but he does not appear to be well known in the vintage scooter community. He is a loner it seems. Nothing wrong with that. But someone well known would lend more credibility to the show to the scooter community. Although it seems to be aimed at another market. Our biggest fear is they will make it look too easy. And its not most times. And we fear people will pay too much for a really challenging scooter and get discouraged.