Front Fork

Ok, things have been slowing down as I am getting ready for the next big push, body work, paint, and then the rebuild! I am still pondering between just polishing up my brake drums and current rims, or painting my brake drums white and getting chrome rims. I will be adding some chrome to the bike but just here and there. I don't want to go super-brit mod with the chrome. Just some accents here and there.

Anyway, I at least needed to get the drums off to look at the brake pads, remove rust off the front fork, and generally do a big clean up of parts, etc. Let me tell you, the front fork was a complete and total bitch! Granted I had some rust and who knows if anyone has looked at this fork since it rolled off the assembly line. Here are some tips and tricks (assuming you have the same type assembly).

1. Spray everything with liquid wrench, let it sit.

2. Brake Drum: The castle nut on the drum was real tight. It is the same size as your spark plug. Get your spark plug wrench out and use it with a hammer if you are having problems. It is six sided and gets a better fit around the whole nut. plus it all ready has a handy place for you to hammer.


3. Front Spring: Once you take off the nut on the bolt for the upper part of the spring, take a screwdriver and spin the piece inside the spring down the spring. It will pull out the bolt. It's just an aluminum piece that holds the bolt and it will spin up and down the spring. You may have to use two screwdrivers. One to pry the spring and the other one to spin the piece.

Once you take off the top bolt you can then just spin the spring itself and it will undo the bolt at the bottom of the spring. Sorry no pics of those pieces inside the spring but you can see them up close at the top and bottom of the springs inside.

4. Front Shock: The front shock was actually also really hard to remove. But I think that was mostly because my bolts were really old and rusty. I still haven't gotten the bolt off the assembly. I was able to get the nut off and then slide off the shock. So my only trick is, get the nut off and don't worry about the bolt, unless you really want to.

5. Holding Pins: The two pins with the notches. This turned out to be easy, scary, and would have been impossible without my friend Shane's dad having lots of crazy tools out on their farm. So Shane's dad had a hydraulic press, which I can't even imagine doing with out it. Here's the pins I am talking about (in the center of the pivot arm):

Here's how we did it, luckily Shane's dad uses the press quite a bit so he was able to figure it out rather quickly. He took a small 6 inch piece of 1' pipe put it under drum assembly (or whatever you want to call it after the drum is removed and where the brakes go). This would be so that as the rods are coming out they have somewhere to go and don't just hit the bench. Then he took a regular old bolt the same size as the rods and put it on top of the rods. The fork is sitting on its side kind of like this (this is NOT my picture but a picture I took from Jim Williams off the scooterbbs.com website while he was helping me trouble shoot this):

A few things about the pic. The first is that I had the fork turned upside down from this picture and I was driving the pins out the other way. I didn't want to push against the aluminum and bend anything. Although the disadvantage to my method is that you might run the risk of folding the "tabs" on the ends of the pins. We attempted to avoid that when we first applied pressure by only lining up the "push" bolt only with the thick part of the tabs. This way we could at least get things moving and hope that once we loosened it a little it would go easier.

The first bolt went no problem. We pushed off center until flush with the aluminum assembly. Then lined up on center and it pushed out no problem once things got moving. Just as we had thought. The tab was in great shape.

The second bolt was a little bit scarier. We had to exert more pressure and we had a definite "pop" when the bolt moved. Looked around, no holes in bodies, all the parts still on the press, big sigh of relief and from that moment on we were able to just push the bolt through real easy. Tab was also still ok.

Again I have no idea how this would work without a hydraulic press. Everyone else seems to recommend a blow torch for heating the aluminum and a brass tap. Tools i don't have readily available anyway and rounding those up turned out to be harder than finding someone with a hydraulic press. Ask at a local garage?

One other thing, when you take out those pins. Watch the one that connects the fork. Inside are grease packed bearings. Pull out the pin just enough to get the fork off but then put the pin back in asap. Also there are a few washers in the assembly watch for them falling off as you take the fork apart once the pins are pushed through.

The brake assembly and brake's themselves were rather easy to get off, just follow the manauals and you shouldn't have any problems.

Now that I know my friend Shane has an aircompressor and a big barn I am thinking of media blasting my Vespa all by myself to get rid of the paint and rust and getting it ready for body work. I'll keep you updated.