Now the top. Look at that friggin goo. There are actually four layers of paint there. Green, red, brown and blue. Hopefully all the stipping will be done by christmas. Then the body work and priming will start. Hopefully I will have most of the engine back together by then.

The bottom all done. The aircraft stripper is great. With a razor scrapper this only took one hour.

The front fender turned out to be aluminum too.

All that aluminum should bring the top speed up to 70km/h. Uhhhh wait a minute..... I weigh 240lbs. Maybe I should not take this one out on the highway.

I'v finished the small bits. Now it's time to tackle the frame.

This is a Vespa "U" model. Only 7000 were made. One recently sold on Ebay for $13,000US.

The only difference between this bike and mine is the front fender and the engine cowl. Mine is even the same colour of green under all the layers of paint.

I would bet my bottom dollar that they were all made at the same time and some made into Allstates and some into U's

After a few days you get a couple of boxes of cleaned up parts ready for etching primer.

Steel on the left - aluminum on the right.

This is a shot inside the bead stripper . You can see the protective gloves and the handlebars in there.

Now that I have most of the small bits done it is time to tackle the main frame. Cleaning 54 years of road goo off the wheel well.

Cleaned up the tailight. This tailight is specific to the earliest models only and so I'm glad it came with the bike because otherwise I would have had to sell a Kidney to buy one.

This is the galss bead stripper. Parts go in dirty and rusty.

And come out nice and clean and ready for paint

These are the electrical terminals that screww into the engine case at the stator. they are extremely hard to find new. And they cost about the same as a night for two at an expensive restaurant. Wanting to restore something historical is pretty grim somedays.

This is what 54 year old aluminum looks like when you strip the origional Vespa "u" seafoam green paint, the Allstate red, and the farmer's blue Tremclad off