The other Lambos

Say the word 'Lambo' and most motoring enthusiasts think 'Lamborghini', but there's a scooter-loving sub-culture out there to whom a Lambo is a Lambretta. While I don't currently own a scooter, I am planning to buy one, so in the meantime I have been amusing myself by building a 1/43 white metal kit of a Lambretta with a sidecar. Here it is.

It's tiny, just 4.5cm or 1.75 inches long.

The kit itself is very simple, just ten parts: three wheels, two
axles, sidecar body, sidecar seat unit, scooter body, the
handlebar unit, and the base.

I found the colour scheme in an online search for photos of
similar Lambos, but I couldn't find the colours I wanted
already mixed, so I mixed and blended my own cream and
the pale minty green (with assistance from my wife Pam, who
is an accomplished artist). Her big tip was that I didn't
just need white to tone down the medium green I was starting
with – I also needed a few drops of blue to change its hue.
Thank you, Pam! I then used an airbrush to apply the paint.

It needed a fair bit of touching up with a fine OO brush to
tidy up blemishes once I peeled away the masking tape.
One of my mistakes was to not wait long enough to let the
enamel paint dry. I thought 48 hours would be enough,
but not when you're applying masking tape...

Finally, I am toying with the idea of going back to riding scooters on the road. Right now I ride a very nice Moto Guzzi 750cc V7 Classic, but I rarely get the chance to take it out into the country. I tend to ride around the city and suburbs when I do go riding. And while selling the Guzzi will be hard to do, the temptation is to get a scooter to have fun with around town.

Back in the 1980s I worked as a road-tester for some local
Australian motorcycle magazines, riding anything and
everything, but the two-wheelers that none of the lads wanted
anything to do with were scooters. So I put my hand up and
loved testing them at the time. This is a photo of me at speed
on a Vespa PE200, back in the day.

Ideally, I'd love to get an old two-stroke scooter. I loved their pop-pop sound, and those little two-stroke engines had plenty of grunt. But getting a nice one will be difficult, and I don't want to spend all my time maintaining an old, worn-out one, so I might have to settle for a modern four-stroke. However, I am getting ahead of myself, I haven't sold the Guzzi yet, and that will be a difficult thing to do!