If you remember the scene in the movie “A Christmas Story” where the Dad is in the basement inventing new swear words to cuss at the furnace, then you’re getting close to my experience riveting the floor rails in place.

What I was hoping would be a relatively painless exercise was an utter pain in the ass. Time consuming, frustrating, difficult.

The new rails
I purchased a complete PX rail kit online to completely replace the original rails. The kit costs around 40 beans and comes with the six metal rails, a length of rubber to be cut as necessary, twelve plastic end caps and a whole bunch of soft aluminum rivets. These rivets are designed to be peened which means hammered by hand to secure them in place.

Doing the research
Like everything else in this restoration I did as much online research in advance as I could. In particular, I found a great posting about approaching the rails on a blog following the restoration of a ’67 Vespa SS180. My big takeaways from the article:

1. Lay down masking tape to protect the paintwork on the floor panel.
2. Dry fit the rails before painting (too late for that), bending them away from the scoot over your knee or by hand until they fit the unique contours of your bike.
3. Don’t bother with the peen rivets for those rivets that are hidden under the bike. Instead use pop-rivets, they’re quicker.
4. Use the peen rivets only on the end caps at the base of the leg-shield where they are visible, for aesthetic integrity.

The prep work
The first thing I realized is that in retrospect it would have been easier to do the floor rails as the first task after the paintjob. I needed to remove the exhaust before I could get clearance under where the back of the floor rails would need rivets. I had only just added this exhaust back on the bike in the previous session. This also required deflating the back tire to make room to pull the securing bolt out.

I also needed to cut an inch or so off the end of the leg-shield trim to make room for the floor rails. I did this by carefully cutting the plastic trim with a hacksaw but still did some damage to the paintwork in the process. This would have been a cleaner cut if it had been done away from the bike before attaching it in the first place.

With the clearance now available to get at all the rivet placements, I used this opportunity to lay down a good amount of masking tape along the length of the floorboard to protect the fresh paint from scratching as best as possible.

Fitting and shaping the rails while protecting the paint as much as possible. You can see where I needed to cut back the leg-shield trim on the right.

Shaping the rails
The rails do come pre-shaped, but every scoot is different. They took some bending to adhere to the unique contours of my scoot. Fortunately the metal is soft and easily bent by hand. It’s a matter of trial and error until you get it. I got them close enough, confident that the rivets would pull the rails the final quarter inch or so in places tight to the contour of the floor and leg-shield.

Pop-Rivets
These are very straightforward. You insert a 3mm rivet into the gun. Push it through the body of the bike and the rail and squeeze. This squeeze spreads the rivet securing both pieces of metal together and then “pops” as it snaps off any excess metal on the rivet. The trick is to rivet from underneath the bike because with the “U” shaped channel of the floor rail you can’t get the “nose” of the rivet gun flush with the surface of the bike. The gun and rivets cost me $20 from Home Depot.

I started with the holes roughly half way along the length of the rails and worked outwards toward both ends. In places, the rivet didn’t get enough grip on the rail to secure it, so I needed to shear out the bad rivet with a flat bladed screwdriver and then knock it back out with a hole punch for a second attempt. Unfortunately this damaged the paint around the hole. Fortunately most of these were under the bike away from view. I think it’ll be worth adding grease around these later because they seem like a ripe opportunity for moisture to get to the exposed metal under the bike.

In the cases where I needed to re-rivet, I added a 3mm washer for extra grip so the order from the top down was washer, rail, floorboard. Then, squeezing a rivet from beneath effectively sandwiched the rail tight between the washer and the body of the bike. This was much more secure.

Problems
This entire process took several hours because unfortunately as I worked around the rails, some previous rivets popped loose as I added new ones. If they can’t stand this kind of torture test, they’ll certainly fall apart once the bike hits the road.

As a result I ended up removing almost all the rivets and adding the washer for extra grip to pretty much every one. This added extra time to the process, extra damaged to the paintwork, and extra frustration but at least resulted in much more secure rails. My tip? Use the washers from the get-go.

Happy with the clean look of the pop-rivets I decided to forego using the hand-peened rivets on the end caps. After all I’m not looking for an exhibition quality bike here, more a daily runner. So I finished up the ends of the rails with pop-rivets.

More Problems
Want to know where most of the cussing came in? The plastic end caps. They slid right over the pop-rivets I used and while they looked good and went on easily, they sat loose in the rails. Ugh. No good.

Turns out they are designed to work with the supplied peen rivets. They have a recess that means that as you slip them into the end of the rail they “lock” by sliding over the rounded head of the peen rivets.

I considered super-gluing them but realized that again you need to factor vibration in here. Superglue was never going to withstand the shaking of a two-stroke motor, let alone the potholes of NYC streets on a daily basis. After all, this is why Piaggio uses rivets not bolts for this job in the first place.

No other option than to do them the right way. This required me to go back to the pop-rivets I’d added to the end of the rails: shear them and punch them out just like I’d done with the bad rivets prior. This wasted yet more time and did yet more damaged to my pristine paint job. Worse still? This time on the visible lower part of the leg-shield.

With the holes at the end of the rails now free of the pop-rivets I went ahead and dropped in the soft aluminum peen rivets that came with the floor-rail kit.

More-more problems
With the correct rivets now in place it should have been a simple matter of sliding over the plastic end-caps. Wrong. Try as I might this was close to impossible. I just couldn’t get the damn plastic to slip over the rivet heads even after adding copious amounts of WD-40, grease and prying open the ends of the rails slightly with pliers.

I later found out after a couple more hours of this frustration that had I peened the rivet securely into place first, and then added the end-caps they would have slipped on easily. But I was trying to slip the end caps over the rivets not yet secured. Just the 1mm or so of play they still had in them meant that they were sitting too high in the rail channel to prevent the end caps from slipping over them. Once I figured this out things went much more quickly.

More-more-more problems
Hand peening? Translation: Whacking a rivet with a hammer until the soft metal forms a rounded head. This newly formed head means the rivet now has heads on both ends of the rivet’s length: The original head of the rivet (sitting in the floor rail) and the newly hammered head holding tight anything between them. In this case, the rail and the leg-shield. The big problem? Who wants to be whacking a hammer anywhere near a freshly painted scoot?

Protecting the target area for your hammer. (The rivet to the right has already been peened.)

The peen rivets that come with the kit are longer than you need them to be. So the first trick is to cut them down with a hacksaw until you have about ¼” poking through the body of the scooter. This is long enough to have enough of the material to whack flat into the rivet head that’s going to lock them in place, but not so long that you need to hammer more than necessary. This took me some trial and error before I found the correct balance. While it’s nerve-wracking sawing so close to the paintwork, I found it easiest to saw them short in place, rather than at a workbench.

The next challenge is that if you’re going to whack them you need some resistance to hit against. Remember, nothing is holding the other end of the rivet in place. I did this by using a metal weight from my workshop. Other folks have recommended the head of a sledgehammer, anything that gives you some resistance.

Basically you need to hammer the rivet flat from the underside of the floorboard/outer side of the leg-shield and use the resistance of the weight on the top side of the rail to hammer against. This is physically awkward and required me to get on my back holding the hammer in my left hand and holding the weight on the other side with my right. (I’m right-handed.)

As if this awkward position is not enough, you then need to hit the rivet many times over, slowly but surely flattening the head so that it grips the rails to the body of the bike. You need to hit it hard enough to flex the soft metal of the rivet and you need to hit it accurately because if you miss the rivet you just landed a hammer blow to your freshly painted leg-shield. And you need to do this over and over again. Hard. Accurate. Repeat.

Each rivet, even cut down to about ¼” took me about twenty minutes of patient hammering to lock down. Fortunately, while I did miss on a couple of occasions I didn’t do too much damage to the surrounding paintwork. I’d added masking tape around the rivet so that if I did miss, the tape would take the blow, not the paint.

The hardest part was applying force to the counter-weight while hammering. If you’ve ever tried to hammer a nail into a piece of wood that moves as you hammer it (like a fence) you’ll know exactly what I mean here. No resistance, no progress.

Unfortunately, while I had protected most of the paint job on the underside, and put all my concentration into hitting the rivet square on without missing I didn’t pay attention to the weight on the top side. I later found that in places the weight had eaten into the soft metal of the rails. Fortunately most of this damage would later be covered by the rubber but it was yet more damage I could have avoided.

In retrospect, unless you have some sort of air chisel or proper equipment to do this, you really need a friend to be responsible for holding the weight (or “dolly”) in place while you hammer from beneath. The tighter this is held in place, the less hammering (or peening) you need to do.

Final adjustments
After several hours of work, the rails, rivets and end-caps were now in place. The rails were dinged up in places but generally sound, and the peen rivets were, well let’s just call them, serviceable. Doing their job but not about to win any competitions. The real vintage enthusiasts spend a lot of time here even making custom tools to allow them to replicate the factory finish of an Italian peened rivet.

In places between the rivets, the floor rails were still not sitting flush with the floor of the bike. I discovered that by inserting an old chisel inside the rail and hammering it from above I could hammer the rail flat down against the floor where it wasn’t sitting right. This dented the inside track of the rails but it would be later hidden under the rubber grips. Given that the floorboard had originally been one of the more rusty parts of the scooter, you clearly want to do everything you can to avoid places where moisture might get trapped under the rails. I might even add a thin film of grease here before I take her out on the road.

Adding the floor rubber is relatively painless. Look closely on the left and you'll see I still have one more rivet to peen.

Time for the floor rubber
Taking some advice I had read online, I soaked the rubber in a bucket of hot soapy water before using to make it as malleable as possible. At first I tried removing one of the end-caps and sliding the rubber in from the end of the rail but found I could only slide the rubber so far before it wouldn’t budge. In the end it was much easier to leave the end caps alone and tuck the rubber into the rail inch by inch using a flat bladed screwdriver. Once I got close to the end of the rail, I then cut the rubber to length about and half an inch longer than I needed it with a pair of scissors.

Apparently if you don’t cut this extra length the rubber will end up contracting over time and leave a gap between the end of the rubber and the end cap. Given that the rubber is flexible it’s easy enough to cut it slightly long and squeeze it into the rail. In places however this pressure popped off the end caps, so I used a pair of pliers to tighten the ends of the metal rails around the plastic end caps to hold them tighter in place. I minimized the damaged to the soft metal by wrapping the pliers in masking tape before squeezing.

Adding the rubber was in comparison a walk in the park and took about half-an-hour to do all six rails.

The completed rails. Tip: vacuum away any debris. Brushing it away will scratch your paint.

Conclusion
Job done. Phew. In total this took two sessions. Probably eight hours in total. Much longer than I had anticipated. Time and frustration aside I think I did a reasonable job, but like so many things I could do it much better a second time (perish the thought.) More so than ever, I learned some valuable lessons with this part of the restoration/rebuild:

The most important lesson? Patience my young Jedi. You are about to start swinging a hammer, sawing a hacksaw and bending bits of sharp metal near your freshly painted scooter. This is no time to get frustrated and go for short cuts. These short cuts could end up in paint disaster. Take time away from the job and grab a coffee or something if you find yourself getting frustrated. I know there were a couple of times where I was close to giving the scooter a whack with the hammer out of frustration.

‘Til next time.

(VERY IMPORTANT) Lessons learned

• Make the floor rails your first priority after completing the paintwork. You may even want to dry fit the rails first before painting.
• Protect the paintwork with masking tape.
• Use pop-rivets for every rivet except the end caps (both front and back.)
• Use washers over the end of the pop-rivets for extra grip (these are later hidden under the rubber.)
• Use the peen rivets that come with the kit only on the front and back ends of the rails. 6 rails = 12 rivets.
• Practice your peening on the back 6 rivets nearest the engine because these are hidden from view.
• On the leg-shield end-cap rivets use plenty of masking tape around the rivet to be peened in case you miss with a hammer blow.
• Have a friend help you counter the weight of your hammer blows with some form of “off dolly” – a metal weight, another hammer, etc.
• Trust me, the plastic end caps are only going to slide on once the rivets beneath them are tight.
• Tuck the rubber into the rails with a screwdriver; don’t feed it in from the rail-end.
• Cut the rubber slightly longer than you need it to allow for expansion/contraction.

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