I’ll freely admit that I don’t fully understand Rustoration. The art of making something that looks knackered, still look knackered, but not actually be knackered, I find a bit bewildering.
Why not make it look nice, if you are going to that much effort, or just matt black it and be done with it?
The core phrase here is ‘patina’: the lived-in look that only comes from using something for an age. A scooter that has been used for commuting quickly develops a patina of chipped paint and scratches – or it rusts away to nothing if it’s a Vespa GTS used on salted winter roads.
Patina has become so trendy that you can buy brand-new, pre-knackered items such as dirty-look trainers or jeans that have been sandblasted and deliberately ripped at the knees. Some of these fakes seem to work, others not.
Sadly, ‘Kakikeks’: my brand of pre-skidded men’s Y-fronts with saggy waist elastic were not a commercial success. The same goes for the ‘broken-screen-effect’ stickers I made for mobile phones. Back to the drawing board…
In rust we trust
What really seems to work well is rust. Not the fake spray-on rust you can buy in cans for spraying on plastic parts, but real iron oxide eating through paint into mild steel. The sort you find on old Volkswagens, Vespas and Lambrettas. Back when they were all made of metal.
Pasty’s LI is a prime example. It’s a scooter he picked up in this condition and decided to make into a complete ‘street sleeper’ by stuffing it with go-faster goodies from the Casa Performance catalogue. If you think Pasty is an odd nickname for an Italian, then it’s derived from his job on the family Pasticceria (‘patisserie’ or bakery); where they produce enough sweet treats to explode a thousand Mr Creosotes.
Making a mod mad
Pasty challenged the scooter-building skills of top mod Marco from Rimini Lambretta Center in an unusual way. The main challenge was to get him to leave the bodywork entirely alone and only work on the technical parts.
The rust on the legshields is not only genuine, it’s also completely untreated. Where most of the rusty VW Beetles you’ll have seen have been lacquered or given some sort of coating to prevent the rust from spreading, Pasty’s LI remains bare, unprotected and still subject to organic deterioration. For Marco, whose main business is tarting-up old scooters to make them into high gloss examples of Innocenti’s automotive art, leaving a damaged scooter in this condition must have felt extremely unnatural. Talk about giving someone an itch they can’t scratch.
Of course, the great thing about old, worn-out, damaged or matt black scooters is that you can use them without worry. If they pick up a few stone chips then they aren’t ruined, it’s another battle scar that adds to the story.
Rust-O-Rama
For this particular machine, RLC and Gegio from Scooterismo magazine decided to mythologise its discovery and rebirth in video form. In the end, the video project never got any further than the first episode of ‘Rust-O-Rama’; a somewhat bizarre short movie with a plot that probably made more sense in the bar than it does on the screen. Either way, it gives you a very honest chance to see the chassis as it was found and therefore appreciate how little it has changed.
Unloved model
As the most common and unloved model of the Slimstyle Lambretta range, the LI didn’t command a spectacularly high purchase price. It cost €800 in 2015. That might seem excessive to 80s Scooterboys who bought such treasures for a pint and a pack of cheese and onion crisps back in ‘the day’.
Nowadays that’s kinda cheap for any geared scooter with all good panelwork. It’s also less than the price of the CNC Casa Performance front brake that it’s equipped with. These anodised examples of speed-arresting excellence only seem to come in Quality Street wrapper colours, so Pasty picked yellow as the most in keeping with the orange rust theme.
Pop-pickers will spot some rare details: the candy-stripe legshield beading and green-coloured stand and kickstart rubbers. Dig the worn vintage stickers and Abarth buttons in the rear frame rack holes kids.
Go-Go Power
The engine for the S3 has been wholesale swapped for a full Casa Performance SST265 set-up with no expense spared. The T of SST stands for Touring; meaning this is the marginally more sane version of the air-cooled options for the CasaCase. It’s essentially the same engine as the Casa Performance race-winning endurance machine.
Some would say that this 40+hp lout-catapult is not really ‘touring’ in any sense of the word, but Pasty would disagree. It’s simply that the Italians have a totally different concept of touring from the Brits. Very little mileage is usually done on the motorways, and far more time spent on A-roads and in the mountains.
Indeed, Pasty – of Teste Cromate SC – has toured on this scooter; including tackling the Grossglockner high Alpine pass in Austria with scooter friends. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
All you can drink bar
Of course, an engine like this is thirstier than Keith Moon on a session with Oliver Reed. Pasty’s concession to that, and to provide a range further than the next pizzeria, was to fit an old-school twin tank conversion. He found the plumbing and fitting of these awkward shapes one of the hardest parts of the job; which is why most people now plump for the easier option of a dedicated Oiltek aluminium tank. That wouldn’t really be in keeping with the theme though, so rusty still it remains…
Organic
Keeping it real is part of the deal. You can tell that all the rust is genuine and not artificial from the way that the area on the legshields where the front mudguard should be has been protected from the weather and remains entirely rust-free. In its place sits a rusty fork-mounted mudguard from a Lambretta D.
With no protection from the elements the scooter will inevitably continue to evolve, or should that be dissolve, at a glacial pace. Pasty says that one day he might restore it, maybe in 20 years’ time. No rush.
Sticky
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