Motorscooter Diaries part 1 - Boston to VT and back

To take advantage of the celebrated reliability of the Vespa P-series, I embarked on a 500 mile trip, riding my 1980 P200E from Boston, MA, to northern VT and back. I spent most of my childhood growing up in central Vermont, and I am very sentimental about the country there. While in Vermont I visited scenic landmarks and friends and family near the towns of Randolph, Northfield, and the capital - Montpelier.

*note, most of the images are pretty clear and can be enlarged by clicking on them

 
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The trip took 6 hours each way (about 200 miles one way). Because the top speed of Old Rusty is limited to the lower 60s on a flat, I took all secondary roads and minor highways. I made about 4 stops each way to rest my hands, eat and hydrate, and refuel.

This is the longest ride I have gone on, but with a spare tire under the left cowl, a Jerrycan of spare gas, spare cables, and lots of tools, I was prepared for almost any eventuality.

I left Boston at 10am on Friday the 15th. It was a beautiful day - sunny with scattered clouds and about 84 degrees. The temperature was rather warm when stopped, but with a ventilated riding jacket I was quite comfortable once traveling above about 30mph.

The scooter all fueled up in Boston and ready to go
The route took me west out of the city through central Massachusetts.


Here is a shot of the scooter by a pretty pine forest in central Mass


Near the city, nobody paid me much mind (more than usual, anyway, on a colorful old machine like this). But once I was an hour outside the city I started getting noticed - waves from pedestrians in small towns, people in old cars honking, and plenty of waves from motorcyclists. This became particularly common once in southern New Hampshire, where Harleys were a common sight and I, meanwhile, was clearly riding from a long distance off.

When I plotted my route, I foolishly ignored topography, and was unaware that the path I was riding would lead up through the foothills of Mount Monadnock. The scooter rode the higher elevations pretty well, even without adjusting the carburettor, but there was a long stretch of road near the mountain with a posted speed limit of 50 coupled with a very steep incline. There were a few cars behind me which were unhappy. Despite slowing a few cars down, the route past Monadnock was one of the prettiest stretches of the journey, with scenic vistas of mountain farms and alpine lakes.

Here's a gorgeous shot of an old barn with the mountain peak looming in the background

And two pretty shots of the scooter crossing a high elevation lake - one with the foreground under clouds and the peak illuminated, and one with the peak under clouds and the foreground illuminated


On the other side of the mountain's foothills, I took a lunch break in the small town of Marlborough, NH. I ate at a small local gas station - cash only, regular gas only, cheese burger and fries made in front of me for $3...

Mt Monadnock behind me, the rest of the ride through NH felt long - especially once I was riding alongside the Connecticut river and could see the green hills of Vermont on the other side. But eventually I made my crossing near Springfield VT, and I was back in my childhood home state


From here, I rode one of the longest break-free stretches of the journey, but it felt a relief because I was back in VT. By this time, it was near 3pm and the sun was hot and my back quite sore. But Route 5 along the Connecticut river has a gorgeous mixture of curvy forested roads and open views of farm land - tall midsummer crops waving in the breeze along the Connecticut river with green mountains for a backdrop.

Eventually, my path branched off onto Route 12, a forested and shady road which cuts through low mountains up into the Woodstock/Quechee region. While my planned path was to cut northwest through Woodstock up through the mountains and farmland into central Vermont, I had to make a quick detour through the town of Quechee to ride across the gorge. Quechee gorge is a scenic point where the Ottauquechee River cuts deep into the hills. The town is full of tourists on a warm summer day, but the view is beautiful


The ride from Quechee northwest up through Woodstock, Barnard, and Bethel into the town of Randolph where I made my first visit to friends was very pleasant. The air was cool, and I was traveling roads I often took in my childhood. One of the wonderful things about driving through Vermont is that the scenery is constantly changing, from wild fields cut through by meandering rivers, to sugar maple forests, to farm land with cows lazily swatting flies with their tails, to pine-forested mountain roads, to the historic New England towns VT is famous for.

At last, at 4pm, 6 hours since my departure from Boston, I rolled into the town of Randolph where I went to highschool. I stopped by an old friend's house while in town to see her new baby (she was up in town visiting her parents from North Carolina).

I then continued on along Route 12 to Northfield, where I stayed overnight with one of my best friends and his wife. And my long ride was done.

In the following days, I rode the scooter back and forth between the homes of my friends in Northfield and Randolph, and my father in the capital of Montpelier. There were a number of fun adventures I went on for which I don't have photographs, including a scenic bicycle ride with my father along the Winooski river near Stowe, Vermont.

Below are a series of photos from my time on the scooter riding around the state.


While riding from Northfield to Montpelier to visit my father, my odometer turned over to 9,999.9. I figured I had better take a picture, because I wouldn't see that series of numbers again for another 90,000 miles...


The Vermont statehouse is quite a nice building. It's an interesting state, because Montpelier is so small that the governing politicians of Vermont are readily accessible - you can say hello to the governor in the bagel shop in the morning or a senator in the coffee shop just down the road


Here are some shots of Old Rusty stopped at Baker Pond, heading south from my friend's place in Northfield to Randolph. My elementary school class used to go hiking in the state park nearby


I tried to visit the parents of another of my childhood friends near Randolph, but they were not home. Nevertheless, their house has a commanding view of the valley, and I thought it was worth snapping a picture. My home used to be on the other side of the mountains visible across the valley


While I rode almost entirely on paved roads on my journey, most of the roads in Vermont are still dirt roads. To get to houses like that of my friend's parents above, I had to ride some of these paths. While less safe on two wheels, something feels more personal about old country roads like these, and the hazards of riding on gravel aside, the leisurely pace was a good fit for my slow old scooter

A Vermont country road



My last night in Vermont ended with a bonfire down at my friend's pond with a reunion of several old friends. It was nice for the Vespa to be able to attend


And finally, nearly halfway home to Boston, here is a picture of the scooter taken on the Vermont shore of the Connecticut river as I hid from the 90 degree heat


All told, I rode 500 miles on the trip, averaging about 65 miles per gallon (two fill-ups broke 70!). It was a long ride, with the return trip being particularly taxing due to high heat, a strong headwind, and severe traffic outside the city. But the scooter performed without a hitch, and didn't seize up even after long stretches of riding full-throttle. I'm confident that I could cross the continent on this machine as some have done in the past, but it is clear from the riding position and power output of the vehicle that it is not meant to be comfortable for overly long distance rides except at moderate speeds and with frequent breaks. While vintage scooterists consider this a model built for touring relative to other vintage Vespas, the riding position, wheel size, and engine displacement are all still of a design optimized for nimble urban riding.

Still, the scooter handled the task with relative ease, and I believe the route I followed would be absolutely amazing with fall foliage and cooler weather. I may yet ride to Vermont again...

I will leave with an obligatory picture of my father's puppy, Henry, taken on this trip

Disc brake conversion

This conversion was completed a while back now, but my life's been hectic lately and I'm finally getting around to posting.

What I've done: converted my P200E to have fully hydraulic front disc brakes.

Why: I've been using the old beast as a daily rider for a while now, and frequently ride two-up in various conditions from hi-speed cruising to hectic stop and go traffic. Especially when I have a passenger, the stock front drum brakes can be pretty insufficient (note: proper maintenance of the drums can keep them from being useless... if they hardly work at all for you then it's probably not the drum brake's fault, but rather the condition and adjustment of the brakes).

Here's a mostly complete list of the items used for this conversion: 20mm LML fork, 5-spoked PX hub, PX-series speedo cable, Grimeca 20mm disk brake kit, PX lower headset (to provide a mounting point for the handlebar master cylinder), Grimeca/PX handlebar master cylinder, PX hydraulic brake line, PX front mudguard (the original P200 mudguard can be easily modified to fit the bill - a slot would need to be cut into the right side of the rear of the fender to allow the hydraulic hose through).

There are so many things which need to be done to make this work. It's hard to figure out where to start my coverage of the progress.

Let's start simple: I wanted to keep my P200 looking mostly like a P200, despite the upgrade. To that end, I'm retaining the original electrics and speedo, so I want to use a P2 headset cover instead of the PX cover. The problem is that the hydraulic line from the handlebar master cylinder needs to go from outside the headset to inside the headset so it can run down through the frame to the front hub. The PX headset cover is designed for this to happen, but the P2 headset doesn't know what hit it.

To get around this, and opening must be cut in the P2 headset cover to allow the brake line into the headset.

Here is the P200 headset cover on PX lower headset with master cylinder mounted:



Here is the dremel work prior to painting the parts. Now the brake line can be attached to the master cylinder and run down into the headset!


Here are the upper and lower headsets painted and ready for assembly:



Here's the PX front mudguard all painted and ready to go on. At this point I was ready to finish assembly of the fork setup and swap it onto the scoot.




Let me just say - this was a LOT of work. And it's the little things which are so annoying: hydraulic hose doesn't fit with P2 horncrest, so that needs modifying, hydraulic hose doesn't fit through neck of frame between fork tube, so that needs to be ground open wider. PX lower headset is wider than frame so it just looks a little funky. hydraulic hose doesn't fit within P2 headset very well at all - it needs to be CRAMMED in there to fit with speedo and turn signal indicator light. The LML fork tube must be ever so slightly shorter than the P2 fork tube, because the fork bearing retainer nuts are thicker than those of the P2, and prevent the headset bolt hole from lining up with the indentation on the fork. It would work fine with the P2 bearing retainer nuts thickness-wise, but the threads on the fork are a different damn pitch!

Basically - no, the P and PX bodies are not "the same," and LML inexplicably changed very small things with the fork like the fork nut thickness and thread pitch just enough that the parts aren't "compatible".

Ultimately, I got it together. And it stops on a dime. Lovely improvement in the braking and will definitely be a much safer ride. But the effort required was quite large. I always hear that the semi-hydralic setup offers inferior performance - but I suspect they ARE a good deal in terms of the labor-results tradeoff. It probably comes down to the level of performance you demand from your brakes...

Here are some images of the grinding which is necessary to run a standard PX hydraulic hose on a MK1 P. The metal fixings on both ends of the hose are too thick to pass through the opening in the frame around the fork tube. In addition, there is a metal shield around the hose which sits at the level of this opening, to prevent the hose from getting sawed through over time with the turning of the handlebars. Because this metal shield doesn't squish, it will not move back and forth through this opening with sufficient range when the handlebars are turned.

Therefore, I needed to grind the opening wider. I felt bad, but this isn't a load-bearing zone, and makes not aesthetic difference to the scoot.

In the first pic I've drawn in red permanent marker how much I needed to grind to run the hose through. However, if you can tell from the second picture, further grinding was necessary along the extent of the opening to allow the metal-shielded hose sufficient room to move (otherwise, you literally can't turn the handlebar more than maybe 5 degrees to the right without the hose getting jammed and trapping your steering in that position).



Here is the finished product - notice further grinding was done to allow the hydraulic hose room to move without jamming the steering up:



Routing the hydraulic hose was also a chore. It passes down through the gap in the frame around the fork tube and out to the finder, then down through a hole in the back of the fender to the calipers.

The hose needs to be held in place near the pivot point of the fender to fit under the horcrest amicably (but see below). On a PX, there is a hole in the frame near the fork tube at the height of the turn signals, and a ziptie with a plug attached clips into this hole and holds the hose in place.

I didn't have a good enough drill bit to run through the thick steel to replicate this hole (which is obviously absent on a MK1 P), so I settled with a ziptie on the fork tube to hold the hose in place at roughly that height. I toyed with schnazier methods, but decided it was a minor point and would be easy to upgrade/change the ziptie approach if it turns out to be insufficient (so far so good).

As hinted above, even when this is done, the MK1 P horncast doesn't have the room for a hydraulic hose passing through - the horn leaves little room behind it, and the openings at the bottom of the horncast to fit around the fork are too small for the hydraulic hose to pass through and rotate around the fork pivot point. So, I got the dremel back out and dremeled away most of this lower lip on the horncast on the right side, giving the hose room to twist and move as the handlebars turn.

It never did fit great, but it's in there. Rubber buffers on the hose at that point still snag a bit on the horncast at times, but nothing dangerous to the handling of the scoot. I'll probably dremel it a wee bit more down the road. On the upside, this modification, like the grinding of the frame near the headset, is not visible externally, so the appearance is still intact.


At last!
Here's the finished product:


The speedo cable is mis-routed in this pic - I have since moved it between the fork and the tire, rather than around the outside.

The only remaining chore was to extend the wires for the front brake switch out of the hydraulic hose hole in the upper headset to the switch on the master cylinder. This was a relatively mild chore in the scheme of the whole project - straightforward soldering is all that is required.

Overall, after months of riding on the conversion, I am very pleased. I feel much safer in tight braking situations. My efforts to keep a fairly stock appearance have me satisfied as well - the original P200 look is simpler and more pleasing to my eyes. Overall, it's turning into a very nice looking scooter from where it started, and it now stops on a dime.

Anyone who wants to pursue this modification themselves should feel free to contact me - it should be obvious at this point that it was quite a chore. Also note, I have a sport shock mounted on the front fork. I recommend a performance shock of this level or higher (perhaps a Bitubo), because with the increased braking power comes increased front-end dive. It is both a comfort and handling consideration to have a stiffer shock with these brakes.