After getting chided by the internets for having my Vespa LX150 serviced at the dealership instead of learning how to maintain it myself, I thought it’d be poetic justice to let the world know I just performed my own brush touch up.

I ordered a paint pen from Scooter Parts Direct for $15 plus shipping. Unlike the picture on their site, the package actually contains two paint pens, one matching the color of your scooter, the other a clearcoat varnish. Piaggio calls it a “Touch-up Pencil,” though it contains liquid paint. Behind the pens you can see some of the scratches I mean to touch up.

The last time my scooter was tipped was actually some time ago, and I think it may have been tipped on purpose. I had been parking at the edge of an entrance to a driveway, and twice I found it tipped uphill, once completely on its side, which did most of the damage, and the other time it happened to fall against the front of car and luckily never hit the ground. On both occasions there was black pickup truck in the driveway that hadn’t been there when I parked. So I don’t know definitively if it was done on purpose or by accident or really by whom, but it pissed me off, and I stopped parking there.

All that to say, I started to see a little rust developing in two of the deeper scratches, (the Vespa body is made of a single piece of metal) so I figured I better patch it up.

Here’s the before shot:

And here’s the after:

It’s not perfect, but from a slight distance, it looks much better than a bunch of white scratches on black paint.