Aprilia SR50

Aprilia's SR50 defined the 'sports scooter' category when it was first released in Europe in 1992.  It was the first scooter with 13" wheels and front + rear disc brake. Add liquid-cooling and you have yourself a high tech, very capable machine. Of course the 2-stroke  carbureted Minarelli horizontal motor is arguably one of the best designs in the scooter world. It came to the USA in 1999, and was also available with a Morini motor which had direct fuel injection, known as Ditech.

I picked up this sweet 02 Ditech model, the bodywork was nearly flawless, but it would not run due to fuel injection issues. Unfortunately the early models (99-03) were prone to alot of finicky problems. I had never worked on a fuel injected scooter so it seemed like a good opportunity to learn a few things...

I also found this carbed Minarelli model, this one was a runner  with a Polini 70cc on it, and an Arrow expansion chamber pipe on it . Super Sweet!

However the body was a bit rough on this one, it had been crashed pretty hard and there were lots of cracks, scratches, and broken mounting points on the panels. 

Pretty cool color though, kind of a yellow-green pearl. Looks good in the pictures, eh?

Well I spent a good bit of time researching the Ditech system and diagnosing faults via the ECU, this beast was flashing like 17 out of 20 possible error codes!! So I concluded that it was a money pit because all of the components in the system are $$$ ... I am a carburetor guy anyway, I like the old school approach to internal combustion. If it has a computer, I am really not interested. I decided to just swap the 02 body work to the running scooter, I really like the Black and red combo and the race replica graphics. 

The stock manifold had a restriction to match the original 12mm carb. I found a nice big bore one and man she woke up! Top speed went from 50 to 65+! I added a Malossi variator and clutch, made a custom rear hugger from an Elite 80 fender and got a new Arrow pipe to replace the tired old one. I split the cases and replaced the crank bearings and seals, topping it off with a fresh hone on the cylinder and all new gaskets to fix a leak at the crankcase. This scooter is such a blast to ride, it accelerates hard enough to lift the front tire and just pulls like a freight train up to 60 mph. In a full tuck downhill I hit 68! The handling is akin to a sportbike and the brakes are phenomenal; it sounds so good I find myself blipping the throttle all the time just to hear it! My new favorite scooter :)