Regualr readers will know I like a Davida helmet. And I was a big fan of their “Cosmic Candy” range… which I thought would set off a 70’s style skelly to a tee… Well, now you’ve got even more choice from the Birkinhead helmet artisans. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls… I present metalflake!

I can do no better than quote from their press release… “The attention to detail, the depth of light and colour: the visual effect of the results is stunning. Davida helmets feel wonderfully luxurious and protective given their snug fitting and leather-lined construction and are well proven for all types of riding adventures.”

Pricewise, they’re not the cheapest helmets on the market, but quality never is is, is it? And the one thing you don’t want to be scrimping on is a bash hat. Davida Jet & Ninety2 RRP £378. Davida Speedster RRP £365 + VAT

With…

It was a perfect spring day to ride the 2015 Vespa Primavera (Orin O’Neill photos)

LYNNWOOD, WASH.?There has been considerable gnashing of teeth and rending of garments on scooter forums about the 2015 Vespa Primavera in no way resembling the 1968-74 smallframe.

Um, that’s a good thing.

It was Victoria Day weekend in Canada… you know what that means (Capital City Scooter Club photos)

Things are winding down in Victoria, B.C.; the 30th edition of the annual Victoria Day weekend scooter rally saw unexpected sunshine and the streets of British Columbia’s capital were filled with scooters (and scooterists) from all over Canada and the U.S.

Pete Davis of the   British Lambretta Archive sent me this fantastic  pic of a couple of LCGB riders in the 1965 Milan to Taranto a 1,000 mile regularity trial, a event organised by the Lambretta Club d’Italia.

A little digging led me to discover this great video on YouTube…

…and a fantastic article on the ever excellent Team S Equipe blog, here.

Joshua Donow photo

I’ve touched on this before, but in case you missed it, Joshua Donow of Ann Arbor, Mich. shows how you can fit not one, but two scooters into the cargo area of a Honda Element. You’re welcome.

I came across Emma’s photography on Flickr, and had to feature it on the blog! A freelance photographer, based in Birmingham,  she has had a passion for bikes and scooters since she was a young girl…  even burning her leg on the exhaust of her dad’s Honda CB250N Superdream as girl didn’t put her off!  I’m sure you’ll agree from the stunning images here, that Emma has a great ‘eye’ and really captures the essence of the machines she shoots. Of course having some fantastic scoots to shoot doesn’t hurt 🙂Over the last few years Emma’s photography career has started to take off, and she has recently acquired a contract with a scooter restoration specialist… so hopefully you’ll be seeing a lot more of her work soon… there’s talk of a range of products for the Lambretta market, and I’ll feature what I can on the blog.

Emma’s scooter…

Andy, my mate from the Lambretta Club of South Africa, sent me a pic of the patch I designed for their Easter run… an impressive ride from Johannesburg to Durban. Check it out on Google maps… it’s a fair old distance. I’ll post some pics up after the event, as he’s promised to send me some.

Andy is keen to swap some LCSA patches for other regional / international Lambretta Club patches… if you’e up for it, let me know and I’ll put you in touch!

Vespa’s 2014 Primavera makes its Seattle debut (Orin O’Neill photos)

Spring is springing in Seattle and Western Washington. Cherry blossoms and crocus are making their annual appearances. And Vespa’s reborn Primavera made its debut at Vespa Seattle Tuesday.

Remember the rather tasty modern incarnation of the Lambretta GP, The Scomadi, that I wrote about way back in November last year, here?Well there’s an update on the ScooterNova site. At the recent Morecambe Pre-Season Rally, PM Tuning held an open day at their shop, where a couple of Scomadi’s were on display, including a prototype of the forthcoming 50cc Turismo Leggera production model.Scomadi are now transitioning from making a few one offs, to full scale production… with manufacturing in Asia. Regualr reader and Lambrettista corespondent Ian pointed me in the direction of this site… Hanway Motors, who are either producing the Scomadi for Lambretta Innovations, or ripping them off…

Anyway, it’s all good in my humble opinion, and I’m a classic Innocenti man. The Scomadi is a modern version of the Italian original, in the same way as a modern Vespa, and the modern…

Progressive Insurance commercial spokescharacter Flo makes the scene at Scoot About (Orin O’Neill photos)

While the Stella Automatic has been on sale for a while, Seattle Genunine Scooters dealer Scoot About held a launch party Saturday, which spawned a ride featuring Stellas and open to all other scooters.

You’ll never think of the Vespa quite the same way

By guest writer Scott of Pipeburn.

Many times I’ve wished I had a Bazooka attached to my bike, usually after almost being killed by someone who didn’t check their side mirrors. Luckily for them, all I had to unload was my middle finger. So when I first saw this Vespa, I knew most motorcyclists would love the concept—even if it was made for a different purpose. It is named the Vespa 150 TAP (Troupes Aéro Portées) and it’s an Italian Vespa scooter modified by creating a hole in the legshield to carry a M20 75 mm recoilless rifle. The recoil or ‘kick’ from the rifle was counter balanced by venting propellant gases out the rear of the weapon; this eliminated the need for heavy mounts, and enabled the weapon to be fired from the Vespa frame.

There’s a nice NSU Prima on eBay at the moment… and while the Prima was no longer officially a “German Lambretta” as NSU’s licence to build Lambretta’s expired in 1955, you can clearly see the Lambretta DNA in the Prima.
Completely redesigned, a Prima shares few Lambretta components. The bodywork is a development of the LD,with more curvaceous, flowing lines if anything. Elements such as the speedo show a marked difference to Lambretta ones of the time. The engine is also a development of the Lambretta unit, tweaked and refined in NSU’s Neckarsulm factory. The Prima was a well regarded machine, and relatively expensive in it’s day, and still has a strong following today, especially on mainland Europe.

If you’re a fan of the LD Lambretta’s but fancy something a little different, this beautiful Prima may be up your street. It’s up as a “Classified Ad” at £5,000. Here’s the eBay link.

“ Frank Aberdean ” is an online video series, following the adventures of a mysterious masked dude. Set in 1988. It’s not the normal sort of content I feature on here, but it’s fun, and it’s kind of cool. It’s got a Nightmare on Elm Street / Friday 13th sort of vibe about it… to me anyway. The twist is, at the end pf each video chapter, you get to vote on what happen next. Does “Frank” travel by Lambretta or Bronco SUV? You choose.

You know what I want to see… but the only way to be sure of seeing the dude in the red leather jacket, yellow lid and skeleton mask zoom off on a Lambretta… (or is that a Serveta, not that it matters), is to vote. Here. And you just know somewhere there’s a Bronco blog urging their readers to do the same thing.

Lets…

Trawling the web for Lambretta images, I came across this freshly restored, and pimped up LD in Indonesia. Sitting rotting in a shipyard, it was rescued and given the full treatment by XXX, including the unique colour scheme, which it wears well. Very funky!

I even like the red carpet… although whatever material it’s made of – in the UK it would just soak up rain, maybe you can get away with it in Indonesia!

Found on the Vietnamese Xe Va Phong Cách blog, which Google tells me translates to “The Car and Style” although it originally comes from the Indonesian automotive blog dapurpacu.com. From what I can make out the work was done by these guys in Jakarta: Alamat Bengkel Primo 116 Werx 

If you’re reading this in the mystic orient, and you’re english is better than my (or google’s) Indonesian and/or Vientnamese, and I’ve made any glaring errors…

I think the LN looks pretty good next to the LI… obviously I’d go for the original every time… but the more I see it, the more convinced I am that the LN is a good ‘cover version!’. Originally posted on Facebook by the Mystyle Scooter Club Lambretta Pattaya Thailand .

Orin O’Neill photos

Conventional wisdom in the U.S. powersports biz with regard to scooters has not changed over the years: The bike needs to look like an old-skool Vespa, work like a modern scooter, and most importantly, it needs to be inexpensive.

The ideal would therefore seem to be a Vespa P-series with a modern engine and drivetrain. After years of conjecture, rumor and wishful thinking, that vision has finally been rendered in metal?yes, metal, not plastic?by LML, and brought forth in the U.S. (and I imagine the Philippines, too) by the Genuine Scooter Company.

To say the Stella 125 Automatic is perhaps the most important scooter it has introduced to date is not an understatement. Not at all. Never mind the price of gasoline, the Stella Auto could turn out to be the scooter that puts Americans on two wheels in significant numbers. Srsly.

For starters, it’s not going…