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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.
The Lambretta Li150 Series 3 Rebuild – Part 2, Building the Knowledge Base
In my last post I explained the reasons for buying this restoration project, what I failed to tell you was that I have never EVER pulled an engine apart let alone put it back together again in my life! I’ve mucked around with my Vespa’s in the past, but nothing on this scale.
So I had a steep learning curve ahead of me.
One of the great things about the global scooterist community is that it has been going for a long time and as such a lot has been written about restoring scooters – Lambretta and Vespa.
The initial starting point for me was Scootering Magazine, I had been a reader of Scootering 20 odds years ago when I was zipping around town on my 1983 Vespa PE200 and later on my 1994 PX200E, I actually found it useful for the ads as much as the articles and scooter showcases it had. So off to Humphreys news agency in Manly for the latest copy and I was all but set to learn what was happening in the scooter scene since I last bought a copy, needless to say the ads were as helpful as ever.
One of the ads I saw was for a DVD by Scooter Techniques, so i jumped online and bought myself a copy of the Lambretta Engine Rebuild, this was well worth the money and the guy who I assume owns it Ian Skinner seemed like a nice bloke as well.
Disc one deals with stripping the engine and covers in details the following:
- Intro
- Engine removal
- Cowlings removal
- Top end removal
- Flywheel / stator removal
- Magneto housing removal
- Brake shoes / hub retaining plate removal
- Chaincase removal
- Clutch / front sprocket removal
- Gearbox removal
- Crank removal
Disc two covers the actual rebuild, and is very detailed.
- Silent block replacement
- Rear hub bearing / gear selector fitting
- Gearbox (inc. shimming)
- Crankshaft / magneto housing (inc. bearings)
- Front / rear sprockets and chainguides
- Clutch
- Kickstart / chaincase
- Stator / flywheel / brakeshoes
- Top end
- Timing
- Refitting engine / gearbox oil
I cant say how much I enjoyed watching this when I first got it in the post, it really immersed me in the project and made it feel less daunting and will be a permanent feature in my workshop during the rebuild.
Next purchase is what most scooterists, well those that ride Lambretta’s consider to be the bible – the Complete Spanner’s Workshop Manual By Martin ‘Sticky’ Round, this was hard to find and recently only found out that the original version is now out of print and that a revised version is due out later in the year.
I ended up finding it online via a German scooter shop of all places, I also bought the English version of their catalogue and that in itself was a worthy resource as it was packed with heaps of information about the various parts that you can buy along with some great comments about what to pair various performance parts with, the only downside was the way it was written, this ha obviously been translated from German to English and had some serious typos, but some funny ones as well.
Two other books I bought were the Innocenti Lambretta Restoration Guide by Vittorio Tessera & The Lambretta Bible by Pete Davies, both were useful in there own way from a pictorial perspective but not as good as the DVD, Sticky guide and the catalogue.
So my advise, if you are thinking of doing the same thing, start with the DVD, Sticky guide and a catalogue of some sort and buy the other later when you start to think about what colours and style of scooter you are going to rebuild.
Here is the book & DVD list:
