When scooter news breaks, we put it under a tarp in the garage.
Hello Magazine (UK) reports:
The diminutive performer has been turning heads in the British capital as she shows off her riding skills on a black Vespa. The mum-of-two is more accustomed to the back seat of a limousine than the saddle of a scooter, but she has become a biker chick for the film Penelope, in which she plays a pizza delivery girl.
From Motoblog: Piaggio e Aprilia Partner di “Sicuri su due ruote”. It’s in Italian, so I can just make out the gist of it, but apparently Piaggio and Aprilia have invested in safety classes by supplying some scooters. Considering the difficulty of getting into an MSF class, and the expense of private classes, (not to mention the difficulty of targeting the scooter market for advertising) an industry-led initiative would be a fantastic idea here in America, especially since as far as we know, there are no scooter-specific classes or schools here. Does your local shop support a riding safety school, or host their own? They should! Let us know.
While Xkeleton‘s Trickster, a Sachs Madass knockoff, has been creating a lot of online buzz lately, few have noticed that the real thing is now available. It’s being imported by Tomberlin, who otherwise imports mostly dodgy Chinese scooters and who unfortunately took the halfass “bring ’em in and sell ’em as farm equipment” route rather than dealing with homologation and making it the coolest street-legal moped of all time. (the Trickster also lacks DOT/EPA approval) (see comments regarding DOT/EPA approval). But we’re glad to Sachs back in the US, and we’d be even happier to see the 125cc model, as if. (Sach’s official Madass site) Remember the early ’90s Madison, WI scooter club MADass? They’d be stoked.
About.com has a chart listing the seat heights of several common makes and models of scooters. The lowest: the Yamaha Morphous at 25.8 inches, the highest is the good ol’ Vespa PX150 at 31.9.
From the mighty Bill at scoot.net: Vintageprojects.com has free plans for vintage scooters you can build yourself, scanned and PDFified from old copies of Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated, presuming you’re handy and can find all the materials in your workshop. I think i’d rather take my chances on a dodgy $300 Chinese scooter from Pep Boys, but to each his own. Check out the photos, at least.
I’m going to Hell for this, but: “No f**king accident! You got me, didn’t you? Why don’t you kill me? All of ya! F**king Mr Postman, f**k off, go on! F**k off!” Sorry.
Been meaning to post this for a while… Becky put Milena’s photos up on the Chicco Scooter Club site. In other Chicco news, Milena backed it into the living room door and busted out a turn signal. Her (Indiana!) license plate fell off a week before that. I keep telling her to fix it, but she keeps riding it, when she gets a ticket, I’m totally not paying it.
CEO Rocco Sabelli announced yesterday that he expects Piaggio to go public by the end of the summer, based on the strength of their aquisitions and solid growth recently. The company has applied to be listed on the Borsa Italiana.
In honor of Scott Smallwood’s retirement from SuperSonicScooters, we present an interview with Scott, written by David Lucash, that originally ran in 2strokeBuzz on September 19, 2003:
Three weeks or so ago I was killing layover time in the Duty Free shop of the Montreal-Dorval International Airport. While balancing two cartons of Export A’s and giant bars of Toblerone, I spotted a familiar face checking out the bottles of fine liquor. Sure enough, it was Scott Smallwood of Supersonic Scooters of Columbus, Ohio.
He had some time to kill as well, so we made our way to an airport bar for some coffee. Within an hour the coffee turned into vodka tonics and our conversation turned into a question and answer session regarding Scott’s endeavors.
Continue reading “Scott Smallwood 2SB interview (from 2003)”
Scott Smallwood announced today that he will leave SuperSonicScooters next week. Smallwood established the Columbus, OH scooter shop in the mid-90s and made it famous on the strength of his Vespa smallframe tuning expertise. Smallwood dominated the MASS scooter racing league on a specials-class Vespa smallframe, before moving on to GP125 motorcycle racing, and is one of scooterdom’s best-loved and most colorful personalities. Scott leaves SSS to work for Trek Bicycles, he was a successful bicycle racer before a knee injury ended his career and started his interest in motorcycles and scooters.
His open letter to scooterists and friends follows:
Continue reading “Smallwood leaves SuperSonicScooters”
Steve Guzman’s Scooter Scoop is one of my favorite scooter blogs, so in the absence of me having anything to sell you, check out his cool “Mod Rod” T-shirts. I just ordered one for Milena.
Punks in Parkas, another site with a lot of great vintage photos of (mostly) british scooters and scooterists. The navigation and frames are wonky for me but it’s definitely worth checking out. Thanks for the link, Nitro.
I don’t know why I’m infatuated with CEAB Italia’s website, maybe i’m just a sucker for line-drawings of stator coils and electrical doodads. There’s no ordering link, though I think ScooterworksUSA is their US importer. It’d be nice to have one of their coil testers.
Imagine hearing a song you’ve never heard before, and falling in love with it, then finding out it’s the very song that you’d been reading hateful internet posts about for more than a year. Oh, how it hurts to be tricked into digging Kelly Clarkson…
In the toy department in the BHV department store in Paris, I came across a goofy little plush gremlin wearing an old-school motorcycle helmet. I picked him up and squeezed him, and was rewarded with a Sean-Stevens-style onomatopædic two-stroke engine sound. I almost died laughing, and listened another dozen times, but I was too cheap to pay €30 for the thing. When I got home, I looked it up on the internet and found it was the “Annoying Thing”, the basis of the “Crazy Frog” Axel-F-ringtone CD that topped the British charts last year. Cy will never let me live this down, but if you remove it from it’s pop-culture context, it’s pretty damn funny.
Vietnamese artist Quang Da has been collecting autographs on his Lambretta for 15 years. The scooter features the signatures of more than 360 Vietnamese and foreign film stars, including Michael Caine. (Another link with a better photo)