Frame cleaning is finished

Finally finished cleaning the frame.  In between landscaping projects, getting kids off to college, dislocating my shoulder and buying a '73 Primavera 125 smallie.  It has been a busy summer and since this project is on the long term list it does fall to the bottom all to often.

However, the other day I received some cables and bearings so that I could begin working on rebuilding the front fork and then the headset.  With that motivation I took some time this Labor Day weekend to finally finish the frame cleaning which I had been procrastinating.  

It is not perfect and that was never my intention but the rust has been mitigated and the significant amounts of road grease and grime are all gone.  The scooter has had all old surface grease removed with a gentle degreaser and then a coat of Penetrol was applied to help renew the older paint.  This is the same process I used on the first parts of the clean-up earlier in the summer.  As an FYI on those first few sections no new rust has begun to appear even on the bare metal areas.  Partly due to the favorable Colorado climate during the warm and dry summer months and partly due to the  protections offered by the Penetrol and wax which had been applied.  As long as I provide regular maintenance on these exposed areas rust should not be a problem.  This will allow me to leave the original paint and not have to go in to an entire repaint process for the foreseeable future.

Here are the pictures of the final frame cleaning stages.

Clean engine side rear frame.  I also took off those little wires that hold on the engine side cowl and sanded them down to bare metal and then hit them with a coat of Rustoleum clear coat

Hear is the glove box side before treatment with Evapo Rust to mitigate most of the surface rust in this area.

Because it was impossible to dunk this section and the curves made it impossible to puddle the EvapoRust product I used paper towels soaked in the rust remover and then covered those towels with plastic wrap.  I would re-moisten the towels every so often to keep the process moving forward.

In the end you can see the result was very satisfactory.  A small amount of rust remains along the bottom lip of the frame but nothing major and it is not threatening the structure of the scoot at this time.

Here is the back end of the frame before and after cleaning.  I did not remove any rust is this section leaving the few small areas by the license plate holder and the tail light gasket as they were.

And finally the right floorboard with all rust removed and bare metal treated to prevent or significantly slow future rust problems.

Next we move on to rebuilding the front fork and headset.