Skeeve

The headlight is right where the oil cooler needs to be. The ram air ports to the airbox never did anything worth much until you're tapped out in top gear, according to reports, so what about using them & rerouting the airflow thru the cooler? Don't forget ducting to guide the outflow to a low pressure area, or it will all just hang around underneath the fairing sharing the heat around (which would be great when riding in cold weather, but I didn't think you got much of that in Oz?)

I forget how much the Harbor Freight electrostatic spray gun is, but definitely sub $50... And their nylon powder is similarly cheap. The boys using it to coat their bullets don't even bother w/ the spray gun, they just throw it all in a plastic tub & agitate a bit; the powder adheres just fine. Ultimately, the OP gave us a trick question anyway, since the *correct* answer is secret hidden option #3, Manic Salamander brushed stainless replacements since the original equipment are lacking sufficient mass anyway...

Doubt there's a market opportunity for it at this late date, but shortly after Guzzi unveiled the (2v) Griso, I was certain that there would have been more than a few V11 owners who would have liked to upgrade their bikes w/ the manky front x-over headers to the swoopy Griso style 2->1 job. Ah well, lost opperknockities....

Lots of old threads on V11LM about eliminating the front balance pipe. The bottom line is you eliminate some minor headaches and unnecessary weight with a negligible increase in the 4k rpm "hole" in the powerband [which is completely negated by one of the aftermarket x-overs & an ignition re-map.] If you already have or were planning to get a Stucchi or other x-over, then why not go ahead & eliminate any headaches that may result from the loose balance pipe down the road?

Is that red rear subframe/parcel rack structural or cosmetic? It almost looks like you could remove it & leave it in the garage for those days when you actually need it for tying gear to, but the rest of the year as your daily ride it would save you an easy 10# of unneeded steel?

Never cared for the fugly Quat-D exhaust. Rolling your own shouldn't be too hard, if you've got someone who can cut & weld stainless sheet.

I guess, technically, you can claim to be the only owner of a working Ippogrifo! [Guzzi's still-born show bike from the '90s based on the hemi-head small block aero engine...]

You can get a custom seat made, or you can remove the stock cover and foam, roughen/texturize the TPM seat base to provide some "tooth" and then apply some Bondo to smooth out all the sharp corners underneath the foam. Foam ultimately just compresses until you're sitting on the seat pan, so starting with a smooth seat pan is literally more than 1/2 the battle [maybe 3/4?] to distance riding comfort. I stumbled upon this truth years ago when trying to figure out why it was that the bikes back in the '70s all had crappy seats that never received the bitter complaints of the modern bikes that come from the factory with fancy, swoopy "speshuuul" saddles. Yet the '70s seats were literally nothing more than a stamped steel pan, a usually abysmally thin layer of foam and some vinyl sheet to top it off! Hmmm... Those steel seat pans, they're just flat & smooth; all the corners have to be smoothly radiused or you'll punch thru the steel. And hey, wait a minute: that TPM seat base on my nifty modern ricer: it's all smooth on the bottom, but it's plastic: it has to have some sort of reinforcing grid or the damn thing would be too flexible to use! Where'd they put it? [Dismantles seat] Oh! Those fuckwits put the waffle grid on the top side of the plastic seat pan where the foam eventually collapses & your bum can sit nicely on a fakir's bed of nails! Wheee! Never understood that: who cares what the bottom of the seat looks like? But obviously the J-brand engineers must have had some directive to make it "look nice," so hang the rider comfort, let's put the smooth side of the plastic seat base where it does absolutely nobody any good! And where they led, the rest of the industry followed. The V11 seat pan is really much too thick & heavy, because it doesn't have much of a reinforcing grid at all, so they had to make the plastic thicker to compensate. OTOH, there's a nice, square edged recess right in the middle where the rider sits for the battery to reside. Tried heating it up and squishing the pointiest bits flat, and put a little Bondo on to smooth the rest of it over, but never got around to reassembling the seat because I scored a deal on a Bill Whassname* seat here on the forum & never finished the project. * Sorry, I can't for the life of me remember the name of the guy here in the States that used to be the go-to for a custom Guzzi seat for anyone here on V11LM or Wild Guzzi forums. He left the seat biz due to poor health a few years ago [which sux for me, because his lifetime guarantee on the texturized seat vinyl that's failed is now not much good to me... sigh] UPDATE: Maund! His name was Rich Maund...

That's because the H-type don't actually share exhaust [muffler] volumes, they only utilize acoustic balance [which is why they work great for filling in the mid-range hole that's pretty much an acoustic artifact.] Someone dissected one of the H-type here on V11LM years ago & revealed that fact. So they wind up strangling the top end unless you switch to much-higher flowing (non-)mufflers [RCMs or Cherry Bombs, take your pick! ]

Completely normal. On the original 1100 Sport w/ the "ram air" fairing, there was a vacuum lines that connected one intake horn with the other to balance them in a crosswind situation, iirc. But mostly, they're just drains for any water that condenses in the intake horns. Artifacts of ancient Guzzi history or preventive medicine, take your pick.

Well, I never understood why they were called "pork chops" when their profile much more closely approximates lamb chops, but they look nothing like "stilettos" so I'm sticking w/ pork chops so folks here will know what I'm talking about...

I did some thinking on this subject a long time ago (I despise running out of fuel!) and the only solution I could come up with was a siphon inside the tank to straddle the hump. Obviously, you'd want a filter on the rt. end [to prevent the clogging issues Docc so kindly warned us about] and there'd need to be some sort of one-way valve at the top of the hump to bleed air out of the line at a fill-up so the siphon would properly draw as the fuel-level drops on both sides of the tank. Never have gotten around to mucking about with it, & not entirely certain how it would go in on the short-frame tanks [the long frame tanks of course have the big access plate for servicing the in-tank fuel pump, so you could remove the tank & get it all in place that way there's no way to finagle it thru the fuel-filler hole...] A little bit of lead on the ends of the siphon line to weight them and keep the ends on the bottom of the tank should work well enough: as much as we all want lighter bikes, I think this is a justifiable case for adding some weight to the system!

This is why motorcycle fuel tanks should be made from STEEL and tank bags should attach with MAGNETS!..

You're undoubtedly well past this point now, a week later, but I haven't checked in on V11LM in 6 months? Longer? So I just now saw this... Anyway, on a quasi-related note, I took a Corvair engine-rebuilding class once [for folks who adapt them to experimental aircraft usage] and after the 1st engine was built, the instructor put it on a stand and hooked up his handy-dandy drill motor on a dizzy shaft [for those who don't know, the oil pump is on the bottom of the same shaft the runs the distributor on those engines] so he could spin the oil pump & get all the oil into the galleries w/o actually turning the motor. Here's the significant bit: it took a good 10+ minutes of spinning before oil was squirting out the rocker arm oiling holes on all six cylinders. So you might want to disconnect the timing chain and spin up the pump from an external source until you see the oil working its way out the heads [valve covers off to see things, of course!

YUASA has been known to have problems with the "random internal open circuit" now for decades. It will start fine for years [or months, or weeks...], then just suddenly one day... there will be a "snap" & nothing. Not what one wants in a battery needed for a vehicle to run. Things were different in the old days when a bike could be bump- or kick-started & ran off the magneto, and the battery was just there for load-balancing & legal reasons [running the headlight w/ motor off is a DOT requirement, I think.] I like the idea of the lithium moto batteries [LiFePO4, of course, not lithium ion!], but even the Li-PO batteries don't balance charging across all the cells very well and you need a special charger to keep them in top form & to prevent shorter lifespan. Hopefully the price will come down rapidly over the next couple of years, 'cause right now they're just not cost effective unless you're looking to save every extra ounce & are willing to pay the price for their "lightness of being."

Home Depot or Lowes probably has something that can be adapted in their screen door dept. Probably last longer than the stock Bitubo too...

What about having the friction plate resurfaced? They do that w/ car clutches. Yes, I'm aware it may be less than optimal, but if you're looking at replacing the unit anyway, this may get you back on the road while you wait for a good deal/save up money for the replacement parts?.. And btw, you can have it resurfaced with real clutch material instead of the fossilized parmesan Luigi used on the original while you're at it!

Is "rebuilt" a nice way of stating "salvage title so the ins. co. is never going to pay off on the real replacement cost when something bad happens to it?" Nicely done tho'. Pump him for the info on what paint codes he used!

Link for you http://sandiego.craigslist.org/csd/mcy/5004194461.html That's the Tenni that was originally sold out of the Triumph shop on S. Main St. in Santa Ana ~ Sept. 2004? (sorry, memory fades. Maybe 2003?), isn't it? I seem to remember that number. I was going to get it but had a hard time getting my (now ex-) gf to cooperate & come down & see how she felt about the pillion post, & by the time I could finally corral her into coming, it had sold that afternoon. Drat! Moral of the story: if a bike moves you, just get it, or you'll forever rue the day you dithered... Best of luck. Moved on. Still love the Tenni color scheme tho'!

V11 Sport is a naked bike; the Tenni was a special commemorative version of the V11 Le Mans (slightly trick like the Scura, it had the aluminum single-plate clutch that tends to grenade the motor over time. Sometimes cheap & cheerful steel is still the best answer...) Engines otherwise same same. Me personally, I love the Tenni green & silver color combo, and prefer the Le Mans fairing to the naked Sport, altho' the Sport is a fine looker too [along w/ the 1/4 faired Ballabio, Cafe, or Coppa. Never much cared for the Scura, but that's just me, plenty of others like the Scura colors more than the Tenni's... ] The V12 Sport looks little like the V11s, since it is an offshoot of the later V11 (then V12) Breva. Google images of the Breva to get an idea of the styling, only the V12 Sport is a black & white combo that makes you instantly think "Cop bike" (if you're from the States) or "Skunk!" if you're a hick like me... Best of luck w/ your buying decision. Of the bikes you list, I suspect a well-cared-for TL1k would hold it's value the best [since it's already completely depreciated and should be extremely cheap now, plus starting off as the lowest-priced of the lot] and be the most-trouble free/low maintenance ride. Guzzis can rival it once they're well-sorted, but getting to that stage can be a long, irksome process, and of course, you'll be adjusting the valves more often since the TL1k has shim-under-bucket tappets [but the trade off is, major PITA to do the adjustments when necessary, vs. the 1/2 hour job on a Guzzi...] The 'priller & the duck are fun bikes, but you'll come to hate your mechanic's children you're paying to put thru college, and the Bimmer is supposed to be a fine bike but who wants to ride a mount w/ sagging jugs? Guzzis are naturally perkier! Seriously, run by the dealerships & cadge test rides on all you can [obviously, Suzuki has nothing like the TL1K any more, but try a VStrom [DL1k] and imagine it twitchier and with more fire in the blood, like a stallion vs. a gelding, and that would be a good approximation of the TL vs. DL... ]

The zombie thread LIVES! Well justified, what with people still talking about fitting pod filters & such. I wonder if a clear airbox & sidecovers could be made with satisfactory longevity/reliability so we could have a "bike you can see thru?"

How soon we forget! Pete Roper [of sloppage sheet & midget porn empire fame] used to warn repeatedly against these things. Any engineer will tell you aluminum ["ergal" makes it sound oh so sexy, but it's still 6061...] makes for crappy gears unless they're running against something even softer [like nylon/Delrin], since against virtually any other metal it's eventually going to fret & fill your gearbox w/ shiny little aluminum flakes to ruin your day [& engine's life.] The switch from timing gears to chain drive simplified manufacture, and as long as you've got a good chain tensioner, doesn't really compromise anything. If you want to make the switch, insist on all steel gears [iirc, there's just one source for these, somewhere in the UK. If he's still doing them; it was years ago, & I didn't have the money to buy some for such a minimal return on investment besides "It would be cool to hear the gears whine on the overrun..." ] or at least a steel & brass combo. Aluminum has its place in many spots on a motorcycle, but in a gear train isn't one of them.

I seem to recall that there was a switch to a heavier fork oil concurrent with the rework when this 1st appeared here many moons ago. The defect in the design of the needle for compression damping adjuster was also noted [requiring a new needle w/ an actual taper to it instead of just a chamfer on the tip! ]

Jumpin' monkeys! At that price, I hope they're titanium!