Part 2: Egig 170cc ‘bolt on’ Vespa Smallframe kit | ROAD TEST

What does it ride like?

This is where the fun starts.

Egig lives halfway up a mountain from the motorway, so my very first go on the 170 is to descend down to the valley road once again.

The motor is quite unlike any other high-power smallframe kit I’ve ridden because there is decent power available from low rpm. Peak power is only at 7,000. This useful low-rpm performance does feel great as a tourer, for riding 2-up or if you wanted a kit for an Ape 50 for instance.

This engine is extraordinarily forgiving. Riding around some of the hairpins in the hills without any knowledge of what lay around the bend; it would allow me to use one gear either side of the correct one.

On a blind entry to a second gear corner the engine would rev hard enough to scream around in 1st gear if required, or if you entered too fast it would pull around in 3rd at low revs without complaint. Get your gear-changes right though and it really goes well and vibration is not an issue.

Adding to this feeling was Egig’s version of the Fabbri clutch which you can pull in with a single finger, and his ‘Unisex’ street exhaust which fits every type of smallframe without modification and is relatively quiet.

Egig’s clutch has a different specification to the Fabbri one. It uses 5 steel friction plates and contains a few other differences. With 6 springs it’ll handle 25hp and anyone could pull the lever. With 8 springs fitted it’ll handle 30hp, he says.

VIDEO: In the mountains with Egig The only thing that prevents this looking more impressive on the video (above) for a bolt-on kit is the fact that I’m riding with a nutter on a 300cc smallframe; but that’s a totally different league of expenditure and performance. In car performance terms, if the 170 is a hot-hatchback then the 300 is more of a supercar. On the really twisty stuff the 170 could actually keep up with the 300 because it was so much easier to ride. The power spread is wide and useable where the 300 was aggressive and threatening. As soon as there was any sort of straight though, the 300 left me for dust. Egig admits that he actually prefers to ride the 170 as a day-to-day machine. In this terrain I can absolutely see why.

Egig 170 dyno

Egig’s 170 tested with five different exhausts. The set-up I rode (black curve with Unisex exhaust) produces the best torque of the lot. Peak power at 7,000 rpm is civilised for a smallframe.

What’s the 300 like?

I’ll be honest. At the end of the video you can see most of the few kilometres that I rode on it. In the mountains with damp tarmac in the shadow areas there wasn’t time and space to open it up properly.

Egig freely admits that he found his 250 version much easier to ride, and that it took him a couple of hundred km to get comfortable with the extreme power of the 300. I certainly had no chance to master it in two minutes flat.

Some of the problem is simply that there’s enough torque in every gear to lift the front wheel if the revs are right. You have to be careful not to flap your elbow over bumps as just a little extra throttle added by accident can cause the front wheel to lift unintentionally. This is not ideal if you are mid-corner at the time.

I need to play on this again when he’s finished the next chassis for it and modified the frame for a straight run from the 39mm carb into the reedblock. In that layout he says that the 300 engine makes around 60hp! This is in a scooter that weighs less than a fat lad’s lunchbox!

Words, images and video: Sticky