Barry Smyth’s Blog

This weekend I will commence the engine rebuild, more than likely this is going to take a while as i may have missed parts along the way, I thought I had ordered everything needed but with an engine there are always bits you will miss.

I am going to start by adding the Silent Blocks first then the Bearings, once this is done i n then go about dry fitting everything first so I know what else to by.

I ordered an engine stand online today from a Scooter shop called Yesterdays Scooters in Christchurch New Zealand of all places for $80 with air freight, what a bargain.

Dev Tour Exhaust - Polished not Chromed, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

After 2 minutes on the polishing wheel, quite amazing.

Dev Tour Exhaust - Polished not Chromed, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

Before spending 2 minutes on the buffer!

Dev Tour Exhaust - Polished not Chromed, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

I had posted a question on the Lambretta Club of Australia Forum about what to do with my Dev Tour Exhaust, when it arrived from the UK it came looking very rough indeed. The burn marks on each of the welds really stick out for me and I was not very happy about it, particularly when you see some really sparkling exhausts on Lambretta’s these days, plus it looked a lot shinier on the web site that I bought it from.

Anyway, the general consensus from the local enthusiasts was to polish it. I looked into doing this myself to save a few bucks but in the end I was up for three types of polishing compound, and extra polishing wheel for my angle grinder, so it made more sense to give it to an expert.

A few phone calls later and the exhaust was dropped off to Derek at TigMig in Brookvale for some initial testing to see if this would work & boy did it.

You can clearly see the results of 1 minute on the buffing wheel this below, the weld in the middle of the shot was on the buffing wheel for no more than a minute and you can see what it looked like based on the weld on the top right of the picture.

The other two shots are a before and after of the worst effected burn marks, came up a treat.

Needless to say I left it with him to finish off the whole exhaust.

Original condition of my Li150 engine, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

Compared to this!

Nice shiny engine after being Vapour Blasted, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

Looks brand new.

Crankshaft housing, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

This is a shot of the crakshaft housing before vapour blasting, you can see how filthy it is.

Crankshaft housing post Vapour Blasting, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

Looks like new, compared to the previous photo.

DSC_5660, originally uploaded by Barry P Smyth.

Just got my engine back from being Vapour Blasted, this process uses wet spherical glass beads to remove all surface contaminants, if you look closely at the engine casing you would think it is brand new, not 46 years old.

I’ll be getting quite a few parts near the engine Powder coated and I was dry fitting the Dev Tour Exhaust by MD Developments in this shot to see which of the connection parts could be powder coated.

Been a while since the last post, but plenty has been happening.

I have completely dismantled what was left of the engine when I picked it up from the guy I bought it from, he was picking bits and pieces of engine out of boxes all over his shed.

I am presuming that half of the parts are not from the original engine on the basis of this, in fact when I got home and went through what was in my engine lucky dip box I found that there was over , this is what was missing:

• End plate
• Gear cluster
• Gears
• Flywheel
• Stator plate
• Kick starter
• Carby
• Clutch spider
• Crown wheel
• Clutch flange
• Rear brake drum
• Rear hub
• Hub back plate
• Key for the headset lock