100 MPG Madness, Project Aprilia SR50- Brakes, Bling and Suspension

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We think the Aprillia SR50 is perhaps the best looking scooter on the market in the USA.  A few trick parts gets it looking even better!  If they had GP scooters this would be one.

The SR50 in our opinion is a pretty good looking scooter.  It has modern sportbike like styling with crisp lines.  It does not look like a lameo Vespa (you can probably tell we don’t like Vespas.  It’s not the scoots themselves but the attitude of many who ride them, you would think they were on Ducati Desmos or something).

Mapam billet mirrors, Stage 6 reservoir caps, smoked turn signals, Artete grips and a red windscreen look cool.

We still wanted to clean things up a bit and to do some mild customizing. The first thing we did was to get rid of the stock mirrors, these stood out like eye stalks on an ugly bug and were hard to see out of. The aerodynamist that does consulting on our race cars told us the stock mirrors probably account for 10-15% of the scooters total drag, including the rider’s body.

Billet Stage 6 reservoir caps look better than the stock parts by a long ways.  Stage 6 says they help keep the brake fluid cooler but come on, really?

So we replaced the ugly stockers with these CNC machined billet mirrors from Mapam that we found on EBAY. They are made for cruiser bikes but they looked acceptable and at least didn’t have skulls or flames on them. We got red anodized because we thought they would match our bike but now wish we had gotten black. We made the adapters out of some Nissan exhaust manifold studs we had lying around and helicoiled the left hand side for normal threads but the installation was easy. The mirrors are kinda lame for vision but no worse than stock and the sleek looks and lower profile cleans things up.

Smoked turn signals ad rear stop light look cool.  The stoplight is only subtly darker.

We also got some soft Artete grips from our local motorcycle store. They were very comfortable and the red and black rubber matched the bike pretty well.  They do get dirty easily and wear out and fade fast but they are soft, cushy and grippy.

To dress up the bars, we got a set of Stage 6 billet brake reservoir covers CNCed out of aluminum and anodized red.  We also got a set of High Gain Tuning biller brake levers, also red anodized.  The High Gain levers are like jeweled works of art.  They are also cheaper than the stock levers so if you fall and break a lever getting these is a no brainier.  You can get them plain or in black as well.

High Gain Tuning’s Billet brake levers are works of art!

We also got smoked turn signal, brake and side marker lenses as well as a red colored windscreen from SIP Scootershop in Germany.  High Gain Tuning is a dealer for SIP so they can special order these parts.  These parts do absolutely nothing for performance but we thought they looked nice.