I've been looking at an old webpage I did and came across this. It's from about 2003.

Me and Scoooters

I've had scooters of some sort since 1990 and it's gone beyond a hobby I reckon.

I've ended up working with them and spend most of my spare time on them too.

You can look here to see the story behind me and my scooters or just cut to the chase and read about each scooter I have (or have had).

I probably should have got into scooters earlier than I did.
I was a little bit young for the 80’s mod revival and I was a teenage computer nerd so that kept me busy when I might have been going to rallies on the train.

When I started work I used to go everywhere by bicycle and it wasn’t until halfway through my nurse training that I discovered the joys of powered two wheelers.
I was seconded to another hospital, ten miles away. Whilst that distance was do-able, it took a while and wasn’t fun after a late shift in the winter or early in the morning.

So I picked up an X reg Honda Melody moped for £100, looking back it was crap - I looked like a bear on a scooter at the circus but it would do 35mph downhill - I used to go everywhere on it and it extended the distance I would go out and about.
I crashed that one about 2 months after I got it (overtaking a lorry on the inside - I went into a parked van flew about 15 feet and landed in the road. The bike was a write off, the lorry ran over my right foot - according to the doctor if I hadn’t been wearing my work DM’s my foot would have been crushed but the sole of the shoes gave a little then sprung back. I have worn DM’s for work ever since).
With the insurance money I bought another Melody, a B reg.
I went further and further on that, I used to even ride to Brighton on it - 60 miles at 30mph!
I was soon tempted to look at a Vespa by my mate Matty, who I had met at nurse training school. He had a metallic anthracite T5 which looked massive compared to my little melody.
His T5 had belonged to a guy called Ian Soulsby who was a racer. He had obviously tweaked the engine a little as it ran like shit off a shovel.
I saved up a bit and when I was 21 I added my savings to some money that had been put away for safekeeping until I was 21 and I went out and ordered a T5 for myself.
I got it in August 1991, it was metallic aquamarine and I loved it.
I used it rain, shine, in the snow, for work and for pleasure.
I was living in London at the time but I used to go touring on it to Wales, Yorkshire - all over.
I’d been aware of Lambrettas but hadn’t really come across many as my local shop (R Agius in Edgware road, London) didn’t touch them.
In 1992 I went to a Custom show at Bletchley, near Milton Keynes and saw as many Lambrettas as I could take in.
They were sleeker and sexier than Vespas and there seemed to be no limit to what could be done with them.
I joined the LCGB there and then and set about finding a Lambretta to do up.
As chance would have it Agius had a cutdown Lamby frame for sale - an SX200. As it turns out it was a Spanish frame which set me off on a long learning curve of looking more carefully at potential purchases!
So home this frame came and I went off and bought an angle grinder to finish cutting down the frame. I had in mind two scooters for this project - scraid ne baragh (? spelling) and one called Grasshopper. Both these scooters were just cutdown frames with motorcycle tanks (like on an SS90) with normal length forks and straight handlebars, that is what I was after.
Progress with the Lambretta was slow as I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I wanted something to get my teeth into so I picked up a Vespa 152L2. This was the model my Mum had in the sixties so it was kind of bought with her in mind.
I soon had this one stripped down and I learned some hard lessons, like don’t use Nitromors on Alloy parts!
The 152L2 was soon sandblasted and went to Agius’s for painting.
Early in 1993 I saw an ad in Loot for a Vespa 90, it was just off my route to work, in North Kensington. I went too see it on the off chance it was an SS90. It wasn’t but I bought it anyway. I rode it home and it ran like a bag of shit, as it turned out there was only one piston ring in it and no gearbox oil.
In the summer of 1993, just near Hammersmith Hospital where I worked I spotted a Lambretta parked up.
I did a bit of research and worked out it was an Li 125 series 2.
After a few weeks I spotted a for sale sign on it and I went and bought it. It was complete and running. It was being sold by a biker bloke who had bought it for his girlfriend to learn to ride on.
It wasn’t up to London traffic and she’d had a few scares on it so they decided to sell it. It was only £300 which seemed like a lot at the time but it was an original british 125. The Lambretta club enthused how rare it was at the time, only 8 Series 2 125’s in the country on their list but of course now they are ten a penny thanks to all the Italian imports. Apparently no-one wanted them here in the 60's because of the learner laws.

At this time I was living in a terraced house so the scooters had to go through the house if I wanted to do much to them, otherwise I had to work on them in the front garden.

The T5 and the series 2 lived in the front garden and the 152L2, the Vespa 90 and Spanish chopper had all gone through to the shed in the back garden to be worked on.
Friends used to joke that my house was a scooter house of horrors, like the murderer Fred Wests - scooters would go in whole but would come out in small pieces!!

Early in 1994 I picked up another Lambretta. This time it was a series 3 150 special. All the bodywork had been taken off it for someones TV200 project so it was just a rolling chassis - frame, forks, hubs and engine. I thought it would be easy enough to pick up all the bodywork to restore it but as it turned out I have only just got everything for it, 9 years on.

I’d worked my way through a few barrels on the T5 as well as most “performance” exhausts. One barrel had warped and the bore ended up oval. Another nearly went when the rings were worn. I was on a touring holiday near Wales and the scooter would only do 40mph and would be a nightmare to kickstart. I ended up taking it to Taffspeed who put it on their dyno to find it was putting out 4 horsepower (normally about 10-11). They stripped the top end to find that the rings were “as worn as they could be without actually falling apart”. So a new piston and rings and it was back to 11hp and I was happy.

I didn’t do much with any of the other scooters. The shed was an absolute tip and I didn’t have any kind of plan.

I began to tinker with the T5 more and more and fitted a Grimeca disk brake. I sent the headset off to Kegra to have a master cylinder fitted to the handlebars rather than use the semi-hydraulic fork mounted one that comes with the kit.
This conversion saved my life (and probably a few London pedestrians) on more than one occasion in the London traffic.

I continued to play around with exhausts and settled on an old Mikeck pipe that I got of Matty in a swap deal.
This was a lovely pipe, it made the bike feel like it had two power bands, the normal one and then another that would kick in after that and would try and pull your arms off.

All this time I had been riding on L plates, including riding through the one year ban (two years on, one year off).
Looking back it was a silly thing to do as I would have been uninsured in an accident but the T5 was always taxed, MOT’d and insured (for what it was worth).
During the ban I actually got stopped by the police about 4 times but it was always a “lads have been stealing this kind of thing” type stop that never progressed past a check on the police national computer.
Didn’t do my nerves any good though!!
Once I got stopped by a lad who was obviously fresh out of training college. He came over expecting trouble but I had perfected the art of getting a pull. You pull over safely. Park the bike up. Get off, turn the engine off and take your helmet off. As the officer approaches you say “Good morning/afternoon/evening officer, how can I help?”
This certainly stopped the new copper in his tracks and he was not sure what to do next. His sergeant came over and did the familiar “lads have been nicking these round here” routine. It ended up that he wanted to get a Vespa for his wife and after a chat I ended up on my way, having told him to go to Agius and mention my name and ask for Claude who would do him a deal.

I’d put a sito plus exhaust on the T5 to try and avoid unwanted attention from the police, however early in 1996 I decided to put the Mikeck back on. At the same time I decided to do a bit of a top end decoke.
I’d bought some new piston circlips and had been given 15mm ones for a PX125, unbe-known to me the T5 needed 16mm ones!

I thought they went in a bit easily but I soldiered on.
I went out for a spin on it to go and borrow some stuff I needed for a college project and on the way there was horrible tinkling noise and the engine cruised to a halt. I was in the middle of Harlesden (not a nice area if the truth be known). It was dark and the scooter wouldn't start so I had to push it home (about 4 miles).

Off came the top end, no signs of either circlip but the piston and bore was scored to bits and there were a load of pitted marks in the head.

I had the bike picked up by the local shop for repair and they quoted me £100 minimum plus parts to sort it out. As it was them who had sold me the wrong circlips I didn't have much confidence in them so I had the bike dropped off at mine and I decided to tackle it myself.

I had a decision to make about the top end - put on a new one or fit a kit. I'd been corresponding with Mark Broadhurst about tuning the Series 2 and he had impressed me with his sensible and honest recommendations.
I spoke to him about the dead T5 barrel and he recommended using the T5 barrel and head for a Suzuki 170 conversion.
It meant I was off the road while the barrel was being done which meant getting the bus to work but it didn't take very long.

My forced period of bus use lead me to consider learning to drive. I had taken my car test at 18 but had failed and hadn't really had any need to learn to drive up until this point.
I started to learn to drive and whilst I was talking the highway code in my sleep I decided that I might as well do my motorcycle test as well. The laws were being tightened up so I thought I'd do the test while it was still one test for any bike.

The T5 was soon back on the road and was frighteningly quick.
It had so much torque you could pull away in any gear. This was an advantage when I taught my friend Mark to ride on it!

I went and had it dynoed at Taffspeed and it was putting out 14bhp at the rear wheel.

Over that summer I passed the car test and the bike test.
I made the mistake of turning up for my CBT without my driving licence (remember I was supposed to be off the road).
I said "I'll just nip home and get it" and they said "How did you get here". I told them I'd followed a mate in his car while he had ridden my scooter there. They turned a blind eye and we got on great and my CBT was a formality.

Because I had nearly six years of road riding experience I decided not to do a full week course (the price didn't help!).
So I would turn up every so often for refresher courses.

The instructors were all hairy arsed bikers but we got on OK as I think they could see I was half sensible.

The day came for me to take my test and my T5 was making an awful noise. On inspection the sito exhaust had shaken itself to death and there were a couple of holes in it - it sounded like a motocrosser!
There were about 6 of us doing out tests throughout the day and we were riding around all day dropping people off at the test centre as and when their test was.
My test was just before lunch and it was decided that we would have a word with the examiner to decide if my exhaust was suitable.
If not I would have to sort an exhaust out quickly or risk having my test cancelled and losing the fee!

There was a girl in the our party taking her test on her brand new T5 classic. It wasn't even run in yet. She had had it delivered that week to the riding school and had only been using it in the day for learning on.

We had been warned about one examiner. He was ex-police and had a reputation for being really picky and fussy about the stupidest thing.

So when he came out to compare the noise of my holy sito exhaust to the standard one on this nearly new T5 classic I thought the game was up.

The new T5 was started and did a respectable "put put put" as you would expect from a new bike. Mine was started and did more of a "run digga digga digga" like a crosser.

I was sure that was it, game over but the examiner said to me "What are you riding that poxy thing for anyway?"
"Oh no", I thought, "a hardcore anti-scooterist examiner. I'm stuffed".
"You should have a Lambretta. I had one in the 60's, an Li150 series 2. I used to go courting on it", he said.
I told him I was doing up a series 2 but it wasn't ready yet.
I asked him what he thought about the noise difference - you'd have had to have been deaf to not have noticed the difference.
At that he winked at me and told me to come back later for my test.
There was a chance that I would still get another examiner who might get upset about the exhaust but when this same guy came into the waiting room and called my name I knew I had a fair chance of passing, which I did.

That summer I made a discovery that would broaden my horizons 100% - the Internet. I'd used it at work and at college but only a little.

I must have spent 2 solid days on it, searching for everything I could think of.
The first email I sent was sent to Mark Mihok of Seattle to thank him for mentioning my scooter club, the blues and twos SC, on his site -the original motor scooter homepage - which I believe was the first scooter internet site.
We started a correspondence about this and that - paint colours, rare parts and became firm friends.

With a car and a scooter on the road it was hard to jump on the scooter in the British weather and the T5 got a bit neglected.
I kept it on the road while I built a T5 for my friend Mark Gower.
We'd picked up the scooter from TASS in Margate and an engine from Guy Rackley in Harrow. £400 later and Marks scooter was finished. His late dad sprayed it for him in West Ham claret and blue - the first and last scooter Derek sprayed but it's still in that colour scheme 4 years after Derek sadly died.

My sister had got interested in scooters a little so I found her a nice Cento for £50 and she got that for Christmas. She sandblasted a lot of the bodywork at college and we had it sprayed British racing green by Medway scooters.

My mate Matty had got out of scootering but was now back into it and had bought himself another T5.
We stripped it down and Medway did a lovely job of painting it a deep metallic blue. He wanted a quick engine so I bought the engine off him, put it in Mark Gowers T5 (as that had a P2 engine in) and Matty bought himself a Malossi 210 engine with all the goodies.

Matty had a real job getting the T5 to run properly and threw the towel in and decided to sell it.
I bought it off him for £700 (there were receipts for £2000).

So there I was with 2 T5's! But I couldn't really afford to keep the newer one so I decided to sell it.
Mark Gowers friend Keith arranged to buy it but didn't want the fast engine in it so I had to find a 125 engine to put in it.

The only nearly standard engine I had around was the one from my T5. A quick swap of top ends (so I could keep the Broadhurst top end) and Keith was happy with a the standard T5.

I was now faced with the prospect of putting this scary Malossi engine in my T5 but I have never run a 2nd hand engine without checking it, even though this one had just been "rebuilt" by the lad that sold it to Matty.
As I stripped it down I solved the problem that had lead to Matty losing his rag with it. He could not get the clutch adjusted right, no matter what. On inspection, even though the engine was not running auto lube the cog for the auto lube was not between the crank and the clutch. This 4 or 5mm meant that Matty would never have been able to get the clutch adjusted.

As I stripped the engine down further it was a shop of horrors that I found.
The engine had been built on old style casings with an old style gearbox. The casings were full of filler and the crank was knackered.

So I was faced with the situation of having a scooter but no decent engine and so I began, unknown to me at the time, three years of having no scooter on the road.

During this time I attempted to start my own business sandblasting scooters. It was doomed to fail as I hadn't done enough research into pricing and I was doing from home with a compressor that wasn't powerful enough to let me turn the work over quickly enough.
I stopped sandblasting and went back to nursing, luckily I hadn't persevered too long when I knew it wasn't working so I didn't incur any debts and had paid for the equipment which I still have to this day.

I decided to crack on with the T5 and the Series 2 at the same time so they both went off to Medway scooters.
The Series 2 got done very quickly but the T5 got started just before I moved to Yorkshire in 1998 and they are "looking after" it for me until I decide what to do with it.

In the winter before I moved I picked up a cheap model D.
I have always liked the open frame Lambrettas and this one was a bargain. It was missing a few bits but was the basis of a good project.

The area of Yorkshire where I live (Pickering, on the edge of the North Yorkshire moors) is a perfect scootering area.
Miles and miles of country lanes, all flat to the south - ideal for running in a scooter and all hilly to the north - "heart beat country" - ideal for testing your skills on hills and curvy roads.

The move to Pickering also gained me a proper garage and three brick built sheds with road access. To someone that had had half a shed accessed through a terraced house this was a dream come true.
The plan was one shed for storage, one as a paint booth, one as a dirty area/blasting room and the garage for scooters and clean rebuilding.
This plan changed on the first day when we realised that the garden tools would have to go somewhere.
I have since, by negotiation, ended up with the garage and one shed.

While the T5 was away I made a start on doing an engine for it.
I kept what was worth keeping from Mattys Malossi engine (basically just the barrel and some engine internals) and added that to the bits from the engine I had swapped with Mark Gower for a T5 engine.
That was enough to send the casings, head and barrel off to Mark Broadhurst for one of his Suzuki 220 conversions.

Over a period of conversation with Seattle Mark he told me he wanted to buy a load of Vespas and Lambrettas to ship over to the states.
I spoke to an old acquaintance from R Agius, Craig O'Dwyer (he used to be a mechanic there) and he agreed to help out.
Lists went back and forth and in March 1999 we went over to Italy to supervise the loading of the container.

Mark and I drove down to Italy with Craig and his girlfriend.
We went to a massive parts fair in Piacenza, near Milan.
It was mind boggling, there were mint (and I mean mint) GP150's for £300, Model D's for £300. Unfortunately Craig’s van was full so he couldn't take anything back for me apart from some Li special side panels (£15 a pair, mint) and some Li legshields (£15 again).
It was on this trip that we met the man at the Italian end of the scooter deal, Gianluca Tiepolo. We got on very well with Gianluca and I still speak to him now and again. Gianluca sells Lambrettas to many British shops. He has been a victim of his own success though as there are hardly any Lambrettas for sale in Italy now.

One of the highlights of the trip was loading up the 40 foot container with all the Vespas and Lambrettas (and a few rare MotoGuzzi motorcycles).
For some reason I was given the job of pushing the scooters on and off a pallet that was being used with a forklift truck to lift the scooters up to the container.
I had to learn quickly but I can still just about remember the Italian for up/down/left/right/forwards/backwards/stop!

Another highlight was a meal we had. Gianluca took us to what can only be described as a cross between a working mans club and a greasy spoon cafe. We had a superb meal and it worked out about £6 a head for one of the best Italian meals I have had.

At the time of the Italian trip I had moved back to London for work indefinately. I had taken a few months off when I first moved up and had done a bit of agency work but struggled to find a decent full time post. A three month temporary contract came and went and when that finished I took the decision to go back to London for work.

The car I had at the time was great. It was a Nissan prairie estate (almost one of the first "people carriers"). With the back seats folded forward you could get a complete Vespa or Lambretta in no problem.

I moved into the nurses home at Hammersmith Hospital (where I had trained and worked).
After the Italian trip I negotiated a cheap GP150 from Gianluca as my part of the deal. It cost £400 and was very solid and complete.
I actually kept it in the back of the car to keep it safe as I wasn't happy locking it up at the hospital.
Colleagues at work nicknamed me "the Italian job" as whenever I gave someone a lift they commented on the presence of a scooter in the back of the car.

I decided to get the GP running to use in the summer so the next trip home I gathered together some tools and some parts I had collected over the last few years (a tuned barrel, carb kit, clubman exhaust, race crank, electronic ignition).

I arranged to work on the bike at Guy Rackleys workshop in Harrow.
I'd do a bit here and there on my days off, it was the summer so it was nice enough to work on the scooter in the yard outside.

I decided to take the engine out to do a full rebuild and, as has happened before, before I knew it the GP was a pile of bits.
It seemed a bit pointless driving round with a pile of scooter parts in the back of the car so the next trip home I put the pile of GP bits in the garage. I decided to get the engine done properly so I dropped all the bits of at MB Developments for Mark to do a rebuild on it.

During that summer I had moved out the nurses home and managed to do three house-sits in a row - the first for a colleague who had just got married and was on a long honeymoon in the far east, the 2nd for another colleague who always had a months holiday in the summer and the 3rd for my old neighbour who was on a long canal boat holiday.
During the middle houses I had use of my friends Piaggio Hexagon. It took a little while to get used to the automatic gearbox but once I had got the hang of it I enjoyed using the Hexagon and it rekindled my need to get back on 2 wheels.

Mark Gower had picked up a P200 in strange circumstances. He was living in Kentish town at the time with Keith (the lad I had sold the blue T5 to) and another lad called Adrian who had a Series 3 Lambretta Li.
One day a bloke came to the door (having seen the three scooters parked outside) and asked Keith if he was interested in a Vespa.
He was actually giving it away but Keith turned him down (Keith is half Norwegian and a bit mad!). Mark came home to find out that Keith had turned down a free scooter and went and found the bloke (who lived up the road) and was given the scooter!
He didn't really want it so I made a deal to buy it from him at a good price. It was a runner and just needed a little bit of work to get it on the road.
I took it home and fitted the Suzuki/Malossi 220 engine I had had done by Mark Broadhurst.
The only time I could work on the Vespa was during the 3 day weekend trips I made North every other weekend.
It became very frustrating as I would find I would need a certain part and knew it would two weeks before I would be back with the part so the work on the P200 seemed to drag on forever.
I got a bit disillusioned with having a P200 on the road as they were never really my cup of tea so I just stuck a dust sheet over it.
In the Autumn of 1999 I got a permanent full time job in Malton, near Pickering so I turned my back on London and went back to Yorkshire.
I only had a 16 mile round trip which took about ten minutes each way in the car. The scooters took a bit of a back seat as I began to settle into full time Yorkshire life.

One thing I had discovered during the winter of 1999 was ebay, the online auction site. I think I was one of the first UK scooterists to use the site.
I met a guy from Harrogate on there, Chris Matthews and it seemed like we were the only two UK people on ebay buying and selling scooter bits. In the summer of 2000 I had the GP150 engine back from Mark Broadhurst and was itching to put it into a scooter.
I thought to put it into the series 2 which was back from the painters and was just sat in the shed wrapped up in bubble wrap.
I started to build the series 2 round the GP engine but got a bit stuck with series 2 parts so I thought to put it into the GP where it belonged.
I decided against that as the GP needed restoring as I didn't want to rebuild it as it was.
So I was on the look-out for something else to put the GP engine in.
Chris had a nice SX200 that I had seen a few times and he had put it up for sale on ebay.
After a chat I agreed to do a swap with Chris - the SX (minus engine and disc brake) in exchange for the GP (minus engine) and the Vespa 220 engine.
I put the GP engine into the SX and managed to get it running OK but I was stumped by Lambretta electrics.
I was now carless (thanks to an absolute Lemon of a car I had bought to replace the Nissan, which had blown the engine).
I needed something to commute on so I decided to forget about the Lambretta and get a new Gilera 125SP runner.
I rode the runner through a very harsh winter and my memory of that winter is spending the first hour of each shifts with wet socks from the ride to work.
That winter was also when there were some severe floods in and around where I worked. This meant a doubling of my journey to work but the Gilera coped with it well.
In the spring of that year I had started dabbling in web design as a bit of a hobby.
I'd done a small site for myself and approached Mark Broadhurst to see if he wanted a website doing.
I had been a customer and friend of Marks for 6 years by now and had had nothing but quality work from him and so I thought I would spread the word by doing a small website for him.
I had been on at Mark to get a website done since I first discovered the internet but Mark hadn't used the internet so he didn't know what I was talking about.
Every time I saw him I kept on at him and in the end I just got on with it.

I initially ran the site completely myself, dealing with the emails in my spare time and soon the site began to generate a lot of interest in MB Developments.

I would fax any queries and orders to Mark and he would fax back with answers and comments.
This got more and more involved until the Autumn of 2000 when Mark asked if I would be interested in working for him on a part time basis.
I couldn't afford to give up nursing so I started working for Mark two days per week in January 2001. At the time I had dropped down on my nursing hours but it meant I was working 6 days a week, not much fun!
I would commute on the Gilera through some AWFUL weather and would stay at Marks for one night so I was doing 2 days a week with only one journey!
This was all going well until the day of the Great Heck rail crash when some local scumbags tried to steal the runner from outside the workshop.
They succeeded in damaging every single panel of the bike so the bike stayed in the workshop while the insurance claim was sorted out.
Things were now very difficult! No car, no scooter on the road but very luckily a friend in London was getting a new car so I got their old one (a 1990 Vauxhall saloon) for a steal and so I was back on the road.
Things got busier and busier that spring and in the April Mark offered to take me on full time.
It was a bit of a wrench to give up nursing, something I had done for nearly 12 years but I was ready to get out really and MB Developments seemed like a great challenge.
Apart from sorting out the Gilera I didn’t do very much with the other scooters. I didn’t have a lot of spare time as I had my West Ham season ticket which meant many weekends were spent in London.

The garage was an absolute mess with scooters, parts and tools all over the place spread through the garage and half of two of the sheds. I would try and do a small job (like building some forks) and would end up getting frustrated by not being able to find the tools or the parts I needed.

I decided to try and concentrate on doing one scooter at a time so I put the GP150 engine back into the series 2 and started building that.
Working at MB Developments makes it a lot easier to find the parts I need so progress became slow but steady on the series 2.
I was still working in a tip though, it would take me half an hour to clear a space to work in, then I’d get pissed off and give up.
In the spring of 2002 I bought a Spanish series 2 Li150 winter model from Anthony Beaumont (Buzzsolomoto) in Bradford.
It needed a lot of work, it wasn’t in good enough condition to put straight on the road so I did my usual trick of stripping it to a pile of bits!

I hadn’t really used the Gilera much since it was repaired and the read caliper had seized up (probably due to all the winter usage it had had).
While sorting out the caliper I managed to shear an exhaust bolt so I got disillusioned with the runner.
I had had my eye on a Series 1 for a project for a while and I picked up a very nice 125 from Cambridge Lambretta.
The engine was missing the top end and crank but other than that it was in good condition apart from being sprayed in an awful bright yellow.
Looking back I should have probably put the GP engine in it and made it into a tatty run-around but again I stripped it right down (well not right down - the frame, engine, right side panel and right rear runner are all at work being used to make sure that our exhausts fit on a series 1 frame like they are supposed to!)

I’ve never been a snob about Lambrettas like some people are.
Although I like Italian Lambrettas I think that Italian, Spanish and Indian machines are all as valid as each other.
I like things that are a little different from the run of the mill which is why I bought the Spanish winter model.
In the Winter of 2002 I found that Perry Lewis, the well known collector of Spanish Lambrettas, was selling some Spanish factory prototype frames.
If they had been Italian they would have been snapped up many years ago for a lot of money but because they were Spanish many people just turned up their noses at them.
I had the choice of two but went for the one I got because it seemed to be the most complete and interesting.
It wasn’t super cheap but it is unique and will be great when it is finished.
By now the garage and shed were bursting at the seams with scooter projects and I was getting very disheartened with them all as I could see now way I would ever get them done.

I had been on a motivational workshop at my gym and had signed up to be emailed about future workshops.
I got an email offering a free lifestyle coaching session to the first 5 people to reply.
I happened to be the first to reply so I got a free coaching session.
This involved an hours chat on the phone where I would be given help with a problem I was stuck with.
I chose the lack of progress with my scooters as my “challenge” and so I worked through this with Daphne the coach.
She went through a few questions to suss out why I was stuck and she said that the best way to sort out any problem was to break it down into small manageable chunks with clear goals.
I decided that the first goal would be to tidy the garage and sheds so I could nip in and do a small job without getting stressed about not finding the tool or part I needed.
Each goal can be rewarded in whatever way you see fit.
I was encouraged to imagine the outcomes as well as this helps you along the way.
I was to imagine working in a nice tidy garage with all the tools easily to hand and to imagine riding on the scooters when they were finished.

One problem I had was that I would easily get sidetracked - I would find a long lost tool and would then go off at a tangent using that tool.
Daphne said that this was a “gremlin” cropping up - a distraction that could keep me from achieving the goal in hand.
It was quite hard but I persevered with the tidying and soon the garage and shed were tidy. I found that I had about 8 13mm spanners - the result of buying a new tool because you can’t find the one you’ve got!
I decided that my reward for tidying the garage would be to get a hydraulic workbench to work on the scooters. The workbench I had made is a lovely height to work at but if you build a scooter on it it is too heavy to get off!
I found an article in a classic bike magazine which described how to build your own hydraulic workbench - all you needed was to be able to weld. I thought it would be fairly easy with access to steel at work and all the tools I needed but after I discussed with Daphne we decided that the workbench (my reward!) was at risk of becoming another challenge if I wasn’t careful.
So I decided not to build a workbench but to buy one instead.
It would cost a few quid but it would be a proper reward.
The question was how to pay for it? During the tidying I found a lot of bits that were from long abandoned projects or leftovers from scooters I had sold.
It seemed a pain but I spent about an hour listing them, photographing them and putting them on ebay.
I had about 60 things and I wanted shot of them so I started them all at £1 each and watched them go.
I was quite pleased that the 60 items ended up selling for over £300, more than the price of the workbench.
So I ended up with a nice tidy garage and shed with a lovely workbench to use.
First up on the bench was the Gilera - it needed a lot of sorting out so I dropped it off with one of our customers, Trev Tingle, who buys and sells Gileras as a hobby. He buys stolen/recovered runners from insurance companies and puts them back on the road if he can. If he can’t he breaks them for spares.
He took about 2 weeks to sort the Gilera out and apart from the spark plug falling out a mile after I picked the scooter up from him it has been as good as gold since.

Next on the bench is the series 2, which is definitely keeping the GP 150 engine in it! I’ve been doing little bits to it here and there, using it as an opportunity to make notes to put together fastener kits for work.

I nearly got stuck because I need to sandblast a few things to finish it (hubs) so I put in a bit of time and money to get my sandblaster up and running again. It’s not quite right as I need to rig up some sort of proper dust extraction system (or I can’t see what I’m doing after 2 minutes) but other than that it works very well.
I’ve got it set so that I can use it on alloy items like headsets, rear lights etc without damaging them. You hear of horror stories like people having panels turned inside out by industrial sandblasters but my system is ultra gentle.
I doubt I’d go back into it for a living as it’s impossible to turn it over quick enough but it will keep me happy.

The only other barrier I have to getting on with the rest of the scooters (apart from only being able to spend so much on parts) is that I haven’t found a good sprayer near here.
As more and more people get into scooters the prices and waiting times seem to go up on spray jobs.
I think I will either just do them up in primer and build them like that while I save up for spray jobs or I might go to an evening class to see if I can learn spraying myself. At the end of the day I’ve got the compressor and I can do an OK job with cans so I think I might be OK at it.

I think it’s important to keep a record of what is going on with projects like mine so that if you get disheartened you can see how well you are really getting on. This is why I have done this site as I thought it would be interesting for other people to see what I am on with.
If I can share any tips and ideas then that is good to as long as no-one rips off my ideas!!

Once the series 2 is done I don’t really know the next step in doing the fleet up really. I am getting another series 2 soon for another project so I think I might do that one first as it should be fairly easily as it is based on a cut down style scooter.
The monkey bike should theoretically be easy but I need to make some sort of fuel tank and seat for it so that might hold me back a little.
After that I think I will do two at a time to keep things simple, the two series 3’s at the same time, then the winter model with the series 1, with the cento and the T5 progressing as and when along the way.

I don’t get a lot of time to ride them so it might seem a bit daft to have so many scooters on the go but if you are a proper scooterist you will probably admit that it is hard to stick to just the one scooter!