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Dev Tour Exhaust – Polished not Chromed
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
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
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
Compared to this!
Nice shiny engine after being Vapour Blasted
Posted by Barry on Aug 27, 2010 in Lambretta, Lambretta Series 3 Li150 Rebuild, Scooters, Uncategorized
Looks brand new.
Crankshaft housing
This is a shot of the crakshaft housing before vapour blasting, you can see how filthy it is.
Crankshaft housing post Vapour Blasting
Looks like new, compared to the previous photo.
Test Fitting Dev Tour Exhaust
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.
The Lambretta Li150 Series 3 Rebuild – Part 4, Assessing the engine ready!
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
Quite a list and when you realise what it cost to replace some of this stuff it can be quite a shock!
Anyway, this all eventually turned up with the exception of a few parts which I could live with, so, onto getting the engines ready to rebuild. My first step after dismantling it was to tally up what was needed to rebuild it and this list was HUGE!
Engine Basics:
- All gasgets, bearings, circlips & oil seals
- Magnetics drain plug
- Complete set of engine bits and bobs – SS fastener kit with bolts, nut in SS etc…
- Fan cowling fitting kit
- Gear change sliding dog ball & spring kit
- Clutch Springs
- Brass gear/clutch trunion kit
- Rear hub oil seal retaining plate
- Chain guide or quickslip chain guide
- Rear brake shoe set
MAJOR engine stuff:
- Piston and barrel
- Crank
- Carb
- Exhuast
Additional stuff needed:
- Rear shock
- S3 headset cover
- Complete set of Lambretta workshop tools
Big list isn’t it? Once I knew what was needed I could start researching dealers here in Australia (not many) and overseas (a multitude), I’ll deal with ordering all that in another post as it will be a big one.
So, the parts were ordered and now it was time to look at cleaning the engine and assess it for any minor/major damage, I degreased the engine casings with Koala Kare degreaser, which was easy to use and not as smelly as using a petroleum based degreaser. The guy I bought the scooter from had dismantled it and apparently rebuild the forks, although when I had the forks stripped down recently we found that they are slightly out of alignment so they may need to go off to a guy in Queensland who has a fork jig,
The Lambretta Li150 Series 3 Rebuild – Part 3, More Learnings
If there was one major thing have learned about Lambretta’s in the last few weeks is that they are a 1960′s two-stroke based technology.
What this means for me today is that the engines themselves require a lot of new technology to bring them up the the modest standards that I had with my 1983 PE200, however, I was expecting this and was excited to see so much “kit” on the market to choose from, way too much kit on the market.
After reading through the books mentioned in the last post and coming to grips with what was ahead of me I wanted to reacquaint myself with two-stroke technology.
So I did what most people do, I searched the “interweb” (not googled it) – my search engine of choice is Bing for the time being as I feel Google is not doing very well with returning relevant results any more as it has become bloated (work related rant over).
Seriously though, Bing turned up some great sites for me to look at that had the type of content I was looking for, the best for me was a really simple site Free Engine Info, it had a few good articles on two-stroke technology that I was looking for – particularly on porting versus reed valve induction, carb tuning and exhaust pipe tuning.
A lot of this I had vague memory’s of from my Vespa riding days, I did have a tuned expansion chamber on my 1993 PX200 although back then I thought it was to make the scooter sound louder, not make it go faster.