Leaderboard

Greetings, The site has been tremendously useful to me. I figured it was high time I joined. I bought the scura from eurosports LV. My V7 needed a big sister. Thanks to all the unnamed heroes who have helped me without knowing it. Motorcyclists are the best folks in the world and Guzzista are the best of those.

With as many V11 as you have @Guzzimax, it's more like an orgy on a loaf of crusty bread . . .

All these Scuras! 😃Welcome

You can also use rattle can paints for plastic. With something that faded and with that much texture, paint might be worth considering.

Welcome and congratulations. May as well post up in the Scura registry too.

I’ve never heard a V11 described as sex on toast. I’m trying to imagine what sex on toast is like

Eh . . . nope. That kid is way better than me . . .

No, the starter load is not carried through the ignition switch, just the solenoid load is. the starter motor itself will draw 150 - 170 Amps I don't believe the switch is rated at any more than about 10 Amps, I cannot find the specs. The solenoid has a massive job to do, it has to slide the gear all the way across to engage with the ring gear, I think it takes something like 30 Amps minimum to do that, but the solenoid is designed to pull 50 Amps so why not use all that power. Power = Current squared x resistance, the heavy current coil is 0.25 ohms At 30 Amps the power draw is 30 x 30 x 0.25 = 225 Watts At 50 Amps the power draw is 50 x 50 x 0.25 = 625 Watts Which do you think might work better? This high current to the solenoid only flows for a fraction of a second, as soon as it starts to crank the heavy coil is effectively switched out and the light coil just draws ~ 10 Amps I often see an owner say the bike cranks ok in warm weather but plays up when its cold, there's a very simple explanation for that. The ignition switch has sliding contacts and sliding contacts need to be lubricates or they will quickly wear away. When it is cold the lube becomes much stiffer than normal so it tends to take tension off the contact point therefore the resistance increases to a point that there is insufficient current flowing to get the solenoid moving 1/2 an Ohm is too much. Petroleum jelly aka Vaseline has been used for over 100 years to lubricate sliding contacts. As it ages the jelly loses some of the more volatile components this also makes it stiffer. I think if you were to clean and replace the lube in the switch every 4 or 5 years it would probably keep working ok but I recommend bypassing the switch altogether and give the solenoid the current it was designed to operate on i.e. 50 Amps. The easiest way to do this IMHO is to add another relay next to the solenoid using the original trigger wire to feed the new relays coil If you look at the schematic for a 1999 VII Sport you can see that the start relay on that model doesn't get its power through the ignition switch, instead it gets it from the battery through a fuse the one I had never hesitated to crank all the time I owned it. Another bike that got it right was the early CARC bikes, they also have a direct feed where later ones hav extra relays and still suffer.

As mentioned already, it's funny the strange places they turn up. Although I was a bike fanatic when I was younger, haunted all the bike shops and lusted after the CX100 in the magazines back in the day, I had never actually seen a Moto Guzzi in person through my lifetime. About 12 years ago at work, I'm in the back parking lot on a smoke break, and one of the guys that worked in the traffic office, rides in on a Rosso Mandello; he'd apparently just picked it up from the Chicago ? area in the US on a bus? and ride deal. I was awestruck, be still my beating heart. When the first guzzi you see and touch is a RM, that sets the stage, and is the fodder for a serious addiction, lol