Scooterotica

Anyone have any experience with the 185 Aluminum Lambretta (Steel lined barrels) that some shops are selling......

Are they decent? Any info on them?

Thanks

they can be if bought through a competant tuner. out of the box they are crap. they need a professional eye over them.

I tuned and sorted a 225 version for a customer.........
and when set up/dyno,d .......we were pleasantly surprised to see that the power/torque was better than most rapidos...............

its the same with the kits you mention.........
they do look gash........but can be made to work very well............

crap as in the ports need chamferring & cleaning up? If so That's not a problem.
This barrel is going on a series II engine runnign a stock exhaust....just looking for a bit more power than stock.

no crap as in they will pull indian agricultural farm equipment well but will not be very good on the road

the 200 version and 186 one i have played with were utter crap. but....they can be tuned well.

fitted a 175 kit on a series 2 and the owner was delighted,i then fitted a 185 kit on same seris 2 both with all ports cleaned up nowt sparkling,good allround scooter ,cheap power for the money,
regards
joe

if ya gotta do a lot of work out of the box then imo the standard barrel you have can be made to work very well for less money even with the standard piston, dunno about standard exhaust tho

If you compare the transfer ports between the ali kit and a standard small block barrel, there is no comparision. The ali barrel is huge by comparision. Making Lambretta engines go fast on the road is all about transferring the gas from the crankcase to the top end. If you doubt this statement, look at any motorcycle barrel and you will see the difference between these and Lambretta barrels.

So you could spend many hours reboring an iron GP150 and then trying to make the transfers like those that come in an ali barrel, but it would take a very long time. On that basis, these ali items are good value for money and give decent results (mine makes about 15bhp on the dyno at Lincoln, but was very sick at the top of the rev range).

The best thing about these barrels has been the way it has encouraged people to start tuning "standard" barrels, and this forum has done much to encourage and support this. Hooray.

wasnt there some talk about the transfers being 'incorrectly angled' in the SR thread on the lcgb? and this may restrict the top end of the kit..

this would certainly bear out my experience of the orignal SR barrel, despite cleaning up and tuning the exhaust and inlet and opening the transfer passages it would accelerate very nicely up to 60-65 and then hit a sort of performance wall.. i did intend to start playing with the transfer ports themelves but wrecked the kit before i got the chance..

i fully understand that martin but if you gotta do a fair bit of work on the ally barrel to get it to work ok (after buying it then getting someone to do the work) then for me i would rather get a ts piston, top and tail it and get cast iron in my eye.
im not sure why but i prefer porting iron barrels