Ancillotti TV225 Marcello Taglialegne

Marcello asked us to restore his Series 3 TV175 that had been tuned in the 60's by the famous Ancillotti Bros. of Florence. The scooter came to light a few years ago after being put up for sale in a parts fair in deepest, darkest Southern Italy. It had originally been owned by a Sicilian, who had apparently commissioned the work to be carried out by Ancillotti back in the day. The new owner contacted the Ancillotti's to check on the origins and they personally confirmed that it was one of their fabled tuned scooters. The scooter itself was a real old dog and apart from missing the engine, the bodywork was in a terrible state with the rear section of the frame about to come away completely! Let's just say that if this scooter was a horse then it'd have been shot. However, this is a small - but VERY important - piece of scootering history, so we at RLC had to both 'rescue' it with a conserved resto' whilst maintaining it's all the important originality. Not an easy task. After stripping and cleaning the parts, the repairs were carried out and the search was on for an original engine unit. In the main, Ancillotti used NOS 200cc Innocenti engine casings and after much searching, that's what we located for the project. These were built up around SX200 components to ensure the scooter is 'period correct' and even the barrel was converted over to the Ancillotti 4 stud exhaust fixing set-up. Again, a steel hand-made inlet manifold was constructed to mount the HUGE Dell'Orto 35mm SS1 racing carb the owner asked us to mount. This took loads of work to ensure that it fitted into and cleared the cut- outs in the scooters bodywork (bearing in mind the remote float chamber doesn't move with engine movement, unlike the actual main carb body), all of which were carried out back in the day by the Florence tuners. An original Ancillotti exhaust was located as well and although quite beaten up, judging by the noise level it's fair to say that it's definitely NOT clogged up... On the kickstart side, the recesses in the bodywork (and the very rudimentary brackets inside the legshields) made it clear that a mechanical rev-counter had once been fitted to the scooter. We welded a neat, solid base to the engine sidecasing and then machined it to take an oilseal, before fitting a cable-driven rev counter drive. After blowing-in the paintwork only where needed and clear-coating the lot, we began to build it back up again. Luckily, the original seat was still on the scooter and once recovered, it really tops the show off a treat. The front mudguard is a point of heated debate in the shop - as you either love it or hate it - but it's as Ancillotti did it and therefore, there's no room for alterations. Once fired up for the first time, we put a few km's on the speedo and believe us, it goes as well as it looks. Even if the induction roar of the SS carb and baffles exhaust ensures that it's noisy enough to wake the dead!

Modello:

Ancillotti TV225

Proprietario:

Marcello Taglialegne, Vicenza, Italy