Vespa Leggera Project

Lid Compartment

The first part to be replicated was the lid of the side panel.
5 layers of carbon fiber and resin is strong enough to make that.

The original is 415g weight, but the replica is only 70g.

As you can see, the reverse is not really perfect. That's because is my first part.

The mould is made of plaster and plasticine.

Now putting the 5 layers and lots of resin between them.

Finally, the engine assembled.

Every parts were cleaned and, I must say, they were well preserved. Wear did not ocoured, which is good for a 1968 engine.
I bought this Vespa in 2002 and I trust the ancient owner when he said: "the Vespa doesn't look great, but the engine is working very well".
He was right, despite some kicks of the clutch, which I repaired with a brand new discs.

As seen, I changed the engine's support. The old one was made of aluminum and breaked when I was kicking the pedal to start the engine. I made this in pinewood, heavier but sturdy.

It was hard to put the engine working, tuning the carburetor is not easy, and there were some gasoline leaks. But in the end, I could solve the problems, with some new joints.

My right foot and ankle hurted for a few days because of the kickstarts.

From digitizing to 3D model

Digitizing is finished!
It's possible to see some bucklings!...

...and some dents on the frame.
The picture above is a 3D mesh but shaded.
Now it's time to create a 3D model based on surfaces.
Solidworks software will be used. It's not the best software to work with surfaces, but it's the one that I work everyday.

During the construction of the surfaces, there was necessity to disguise the dents and the bucklings, and put some simetry on the frame.

After long hours building ant triming surfaces, here is the result.

Looking the new surfaces over the original mesh from the digitizing, it's possible to see how crooked the frame was:
The blue it's the new surfaces and the red is the original mesh

3D Digitizing

The device that I'm using for digitalization is this one:

Steinbichler Comet 5

That's a system ideal for product development and quality control.
By scanning the surfaces of a real model, it creates STL mesh, which must be properly treated with apropriate software (geomagic, powershape, etc) converting the STL in surfaces. This task is a little bit boring and might take long.

This picture shows the surfaces being build while I'm taking shots. The software allows to paste each shot in order to link each other until form a unique mesh.
Only this example can have between 50 to 100 shots accoding to the accuracy that we desire.

More technical information about the 3D Digitizer go to the site:
http://www.steinbichler.com/en/main/comet_5.htm

Bibliography & References

Here is some sources for my work.

Today it's easy to find interesting links to guide us in every tasks. There's many information about this issue given by people who loves to share the knowledge.

For example:

To disassembling the engine I had the precious help from:

http://www.scootermercato.com/Garage/Tech-Tips

But check this site because there's more useful tips.

Here goes another:

http://www.scooterhelp.com/

Maintenance, electric and assembly diagrams and other stuff.

Many of this info you can find also in other websites.

Why "Leggera"?

Vespa through the years presented many specific models of the same standard model. Names like "sprint", "veloce", "granturismo", etc were used to distinguish an specific characteristic. But the standard construction remained.

Following the same ideia of the creators, I decided to call to this project the name "Leggera", which means lightweight in italian. It's pretending a new special model that Piaggio launched very lightweight.