Lambretta chopper is Rob’s masterpiece

It’s a Lambretta chopper like no other.

Part scooter, part Harley-Davidson, with a rear wheel from a Yamaha R1, Rob Johnson’s weird and wonderful creation is one of the most extreme of the breed.

The 60-year-old from King’s Lynn has form for devising eye-catching scooters – his Menace and 300 Lambrettas have won more than 150 awards between them – but the stunning chopper is perhaps his masterpiece.

Not that everyone agrees…

Love it or hate it

“It’s caused a lot of rows on Facebook,” he laughs. “Some people love it, but you get the scooter purists who’ll say ‘what an abomination that is, that’s not a scooter’.

“If I’d left the engine at the back with the wheel, and kept a Lambretta rear wheel, I don’t think it would have caused such a stink. But it doesn’t bother me at all – I try not to bite!”

Like so many scooterists of his age, Rob was seduced into the scene after watching Quadrophenia at the cinema with his mates as a teenager.

“As soon as I could, I went and bought a Vespa 50,” he says. “I smashed that up, but I can’t remember how because it didn’t go quickly enough to smash up.

“Then I got a brand new Lambretta GP150, and the first day we went out in it, me and my mate popped off to Hunstanton.

“I ran out of petrol, and I didn’t have any two-stroke oil so I had to fill it up with neat petrol, and the thing was a piece of crap from then on. It went back to the shop a million times, and in the end it got written off in an accident.”

Rocky III custom

Before the accident, Rob had already bought a Spanish Serveta 150, which he had painted yellow, and then with a Rocky III theme on top, his first dip into custom scooters.

“I’d seen custom scooters on the rallies, and I had been a boxer so the Rocky thing was a little bit of me,” he says. “I paid £60 for the yellow at a car shop, and then it was another £60 for the murals, so it was quite a cheap custom.

“I brought it home and my dad said ‘that’s real smart that is, how much did that cost you?’ ‘All told £120’, I said, and he went ‘you idiot, you’ve got that much money you can waste it on a bit of paint’. He kicked off at me big time.”

Back in the ‘80s, Rob and his mates did most of the national rallies, with trips all over the country, including Scarborough and the Isle of Wight.

“Then I got to the kids stage, and my wife made me get rid of the scooter,” he says, “She said ‘that’s it, you’ve got to grow up’.”

Award-winning Menace

And that was indeed it, until the early 2000s, when Rob thought he’d served his time and bought a Lambretta GP200, which would eventually become the award-winning Menace.

“I tinkered with it from day one and changed some bits to chrome, like the exhaust, and then I went a bit silly, chroming the front forks and the engine – I spent about £2,000,” he says.

“Once I started I couldn’t stop, it became an addiction. I took it up to Bradford and this fella called Bertie, and told him roughly what I wanted. He just went mental on it.

“He cut the frame and made it so the back lifted up, and probably went a bit over the top. I should have bought a wrecker to do that, but I chopped up a lovely scooter, so I probably shouldn’t have done it.”

Having come up with the name Menace, he settled on a paint design after watching the film 300, which tells the true story of how 300 Spartans fought an army of 100,000 Persians at Thermopylae in 480BC.

“On the back of the DVD case there was a picture of the Uber Immortal character, and he was just perfect to be my Menace Man,” adds Rob.

The paintjob alone cost £6,000, with protection from 40 layers of lacquer, but the end result proved a huge hit, winning best in show at the Isle of Wight scooter rally.

With almost a complete scooter, minus the frame, from the spare parts left over from the work on Menace, Rob set about his next mission.

Next project: 300

“I came up with the idea of doing a 300 paint job,” he says. “I absolutely love the film. I’ve watched it dozens of times.”

Another £10,000 was sunk into 300, also a 1988 GP200, with 23 scenes from the film gracing its bodywork.

Rob with 300

He was invited to the Bulldog Bash bike rally in Stratford Upon Avon to compete against the big beasts of the motorcycling world.

“We heard they wanted some custom scooters to enter, so we sent off some pictures – it turned out we were the only scooters to enter,” said Rob, who runs a steel construction company.

Menace walked off with the best custom paint award ahead of 100 bikes.

“Ninety nine per cent of the bikers loved them, and some were going overboard about them,” he adds.

“When you pull up somewhere and people ooh and aah it’s quite a buzz. When I ride somewhere you can’t beat the look on people’s faces.”

Bare-frame Lambretta chopper

Roughly at the time he was working on 300, Rob also paid £1,750 for a Lambretta frame already in half-chopped form with a pair of rusty Harley chopper front forks.

Quite a showroom

“There was an engine, but it was just an empty shell with nothing in it,” he remembers, “and on the registration document it just says Lambretta, so I’m not sure what it was originally.”

The question was, what to do with it?

“I’d looked at choppers before and I didn’t really like them, so I thought I’d do one that looks more like a bike, so it looks more like a proper chopper,” says Rob.

“I designed what I wanted, and took it off to some fella who said he could do it. He had it for about a year and he wasn’t getting anywhere with it, and then he said ‘I think it’s too much for me’. So that wasted a year.”

Another few months was wasted at another workshop, before Rob found Richard Norman of RSC Custom Fabrication near Ely in Cambridgeshire, who specialises in building trikes.

“I popped over to see him and he said he could do it,” says Rob. “I thought ‘I’ve heard this before’. But he was brilliant, he did everything I wanted and he did it really quickly.

“He said ‘how much do you want to pay?’ I said ‘as little as possible, obviously’. He did it in his spare time to keep the costs down, but once he’d started it didn’t take long. I think he charged me £2,500 to put it all together.”

Rob had bought a racing Harley swinging arm to house the back wheel, “a big old lump of metal, an ugly thing”.

Chopper comes together

“Richard said ‘what are you doing with that? I’m not putting that on, it’s hideous’, and he fabricated a new rear end,” he adds.

“I told him where I wanted to put the engine, as that’s the biggest difference to a normal chopper because it’s in the middle. I’d pop in to see him on my way home from work, and we worked out between us how we were going to hold it in.”

So how much of the chopper is Lambetta, and how much is Harley?

The scooter parts include a second hand TS1 225 engine bought for £1,700, part of the original frame, and a stretched Lambretta exhaust, while the forks, foot controls, and throttle and clutch levers are all Harley.

The R1 rear wheel, fitted with Nissan disc brakes, is joined at the front by a brakeless wheel from a Piaggio Typhoon – “I couldn’t get a calliper to fit in the gap where the forks are…”.

One day, Rob had a phone call from Richard – ‘pop in your way home and get some petrol’.

“That engine hadn’t been started for six or seven years, and I’m ‘thinking this isn’t going to start’, but it started after about eight kicks,” says Rob.

“Then it was taken apart and sent off to be chromed and painted.”

Liquid

Rob had already come up with a name, Liquid, engraved on the tank by Ady Clarke in Thetford.

“Before I’d even got halfway finished on it, it reminded me of that fellow in the Terminator who melted into liquid, so I thought that’s what I’m going to call it,” he says.

With the chopper all back in one piece, and Rob about £10,000 lighter, it was finally time for a test ride.

“It was horrendous – whoa, what the hell am I doing here?” he laughs. “It’s so long – nearly 9ft – so it takes some getting used to. The steering is a bit ‘different’, and no front brake is a bit hairy.

“I’d ride around the block here and over to a mate who has a transport yard, just to get used to it. It’s not too bad now, but I wouldn’t want to go a long way on it. I want to ride it this year to a show at Swaffham, which is only 20 miles away, but it’ll be a challenge.”

In its short show life, including a custom show in Burton-on-Trent, the chopper has already won a clutch of trophies, including best in show, best engraving and best chrome, and best engineering.

For longer journeys, Rob puts it in his work van, but it’s a tight squeeze.

“I have to let the tyres down to fit it in,” he says. “It goes from corner to corner, but if I leave the tyres pumped up the doors won’t shut.”

Rob also has a bona fide Harley Heritage Softail Classic, which he rode to the East Coast Harley Club’s custom show in King’s Lynn in May.

But once there, he decided to ride home and take his chopper instead.

“Freaky” chopper

“It was quite embarrassing, because it packed up and I had to push it in there,” he smiles. “They couldn’t believe what they were seeing, it was so freaky compared with anything else there.

“It won best scooter, but I did say to them that there wasn’t a lot of competition to beat.

“He said ‘if there’d have been 300 scooters here it would have won, don’t worry’.

“I had to push it the two miles home, and there were motorists stopping on the road, getting out saying ‘can we have a look at it?’ ‘Not really, I’m trying to get home!’.”

And what a home it is. The chopper shares the largest trophy cabinet you’ve ever seen with Menace and 300, a purpose-built display showroom with lights and glass doors.

“It will stay here and get old with me,” says Rob, “unless somebody comes and offers a lot of money for all three. But God knows how much money it would take.”

Scooter stories is a series of articles exploring the lives and experiences of scooterists and collectors. Click on the Scooter Stories category link to read more.