No new piston

I pulled the cylinder and found out that the piston/cylinder/rings are all in great shape. No blowby at the exhaust side or signs of seizing. I won't need to rebore which is a nice surprise.

First component done - Seat

Here are a couple of before pics of the seat. Notice the original thick shaped pad.
The seat frame was beadblasted and painted black. I was going to take it completely apart, but the blasting did a good enough job cleaning everything up that I didn't bother. It looks great and was an easy restore.

I got a Pascoli Mk2 black seatcover to replace the hand sewn cover. The original seat had the original padding which is cushy and comfy. The Pascoli is nice but has thinner foam between the vinyl cover and rubber base. The original foam is thicker and shaped to fill the space between the seat springs and the cover. I tried to put the original foam under the new seat cover but needed a structural backing to prevent the foam from squeezing between the springs. The original rubber backing was too thick so I tried a sheet of black polyethylene. It had the right amount of flex and was much thinner than the original rubber. When dry fitting, it looked like it would work, but when attaching the clips I found out that the stack of padding was a little too thick. So I backed up and put the original rubber (no padding) and the polyethylene under the new seat cover. This made for a good reasonably comfortable seat. Not as cushy as original, but better than the bare Pascoli. I can try again with the original pad if this setup isn't comfortable.

Three coats

Three coats is what I pulled off the body parts today. The original primer and white, another coat of primer, bondo, and white, and a coat or rattle can silver with some more bondo. The second white coat was the most tenacious. Whoever painted that on used some good paint. It was tougher than the original stuff and way tougher than the lousy rattle can paint. With the fenders all taken down to the metal I can see all the ripples and flaws. The front fender will be easy to fix. The cowls will take more work. There were bits of bondo all over and lots of small dents and ripples. Very little rust and no rot though.

Engine grill

As typical with GS engine cowls, the grill was damaged. On this cowl, the grill was cut out and replaced with one out of another scooter. Check out how the slats don't form a parallelegram. The lower three slats are too short at both the front and the rear.
The plan is to cut out the slats to the correct length. If that doesn't work well. I'll need to find another donor cowl with similar slats and weld the set in. Other than the slats, the cowls are straightening up nicely. I've done initial shaping, but still need to get them stripped.