Tips & Tricks

So taking apart the Vespa was actually very straightforward! Taking the engine off was real easy, especially if you have a friend helping. Here are the only real tips I would have to offer.

1. When taking off the headset push the Speedometer cable down into the head tube. You can push that cable as far as you want down the tube because you can just push it back up later. This is real important because as you try to take off the headset you can pinch the cable real easy. Luckily I noticed this and went back and pushed the cable down.

Here's a pic of the speedometer cable before it's off the speedometer itself.


Here's a pic after the headset was pulled off with the speedometer cable in the headtube. I would push it further down than what you see in this picture.


2. To get the Vespa logos, Floor rails, VIN badge and other trim off get a small chisel. You may need to flip over your vespa to get underneath it. This was the very last thing I did. Take the chisel to the small rivet heads sticking out. It won't seem like much when you run your fingers over the rivets but there is just enough there to chisel. Tap gently with a hammer on the chisel and these heads should chisel right off with out much effort. From there the rivets should pop out on the other side with a little leverage from a screw driver under the rails. I took a small nail and "punched" out the rivets from the underside if they gave me any trouble. They popped right out.

3. The brake pedal was actually rather easy for me. I've heard this has been a real problem for others. I took the brake pedal rubber off, sprayed the pin with a lot of Liquid Wrench, let it sit for a couple of hours and then the pin popped right up and I was able to grab it with some needle nose pliers. A really small allen wrench might also be real handy to help push up the pin. It did take me a while to figure out the pin was being pushed UP and it had a small head on it. The pin actually goes up and down as the break is used.

4. The gear cables (not the clutch cable) are behind the kick start in the gear box.
Here's a pic


at first I thought you could just unscrew the cables from that "gear box." But it appears that just makes adjusments. You have to take off the grey cover that you see in this picture. You only need to take the very bottom screw located about where you see the bolt removed in this picture. You can actually see the bolt sitting on top of the gearbox in the picture above.


From there you can open the gear box and unscrew the cables from inside the gearbox.

Make sure you keep track of which cable goes to which part of the gear shifter on your handlebars (well actually inside of your headset but on the end of the shifter tube).

5. Speaking of shifter tubes (and also throttle tube) there is a clip that keeps the tubes and the cable holders inside the headset together. Just pull out those pins and the tubes and the cable holders will pull apart real easy (well if they are a little rusty get a RUBBER mallet, some liquid wrench and then bang them apart).


Those are the only real problems I encountered when taking things off. Of course you have to make the decision if you want to take off any original trim and foot rails. Mine were stock and I went back and forth on whether I wanted to remove the leg shield trim and the foot rails. My final decision was based on the rust on my bike. I had a bit under the foot rails and I would rather have all the rust removed and a really good paint job done then fret over having "stock" rails.