Skeeve

What are you going on about? Wasn't the incident from some road-raging electrician throwing a pair of wire cutters at the bike after Jaap flipped the cager the bird for cutting him off & almost killing him?

"Die cast zinc" = heavy. If you go this route, you'll want to arrange for some sort of mounting to support them [don't forget, you need a pair: one set for both the feed and the return line.] I seem to remember similar discussions about busted plastic elbows when Triumph went to EFI; you might noodle around searching for similar problems & their resolution on (modern) Triumph boards...

Me likey! Mighty tasty!

Uh, bad idea: keep strong alkalis away from your aluminum components unless you want to see them dissolve before your eyes. Try this little experiment: Take a sheet of aluminum foil. Spray it w/ Easy Off. Stand back & count to 10. Any holes in it yet? No? You cheated & used the heavy duty stuff, you rascal! Fine: give it another count of 10. Now imagine that on your engine internals. Not a happy thought, is it?

Best bikini fairing I ever saw was on a Ducati Monster; the company that made that part was Red Racing Products [in Italy], and I bought one for my SV650 [and still haven't gotten a spherical tuit to mount it... Anyway, some years after seeing it, I discovered it was a knockoff of the bikini fairing offered on the Centauro GT. And so we come full circle... Anyway, I'd look into finding an NOS fairing for the Centauro GT or look up RRP to see if they offer something that interests you.

I love those! Of course, my work pays me full salary for my days on jury duty, so they're really just a good opportunity for me to get caught up on my reading... No chance I'd get picked for the actual jury box: lawyers don't want someone smarter than they are sitting on a jury!

Hot Coat'em black to display the bike's nice silver bodywork & engine better. They'll look more "period" in black anyway; no racer back then wasted money on chroming pipes that were only going to get binned in a crash anyway...

You shoulda made it on Tuesday... Nice layout; compact, but with a decent amount of variety! If I have a rich relative pass away or win the lottery in the meantime, I'll be there. Unfortunately, barring these infinitesimally likely possibilities, I doubt I'll have the money needed to get me & my bike across the water! Have some extra fun that day for those of us who wish we could attend, O.K?

That's all fine & dandy, but what we need is an actual empirical measurement of the spring (& by this statement I mean no indictment of your calculations.) I realize that the physicists say that Young's Modulus doesn't change for steel regardless of the temper, but I kinda suspect they're full of it when it comes to actual differences of "springiness" btw some piece of 1080 wire that Sachs managed to spool up, cut to length, indifferently harden & lacklusterly temper before shipping it off to Mandello vs. a premium piece of chrome-silicon bar stock that Ohlin's specified to meet set standards, precisely measured the tempering furnace for the 10C deg range of optimal hardening, cooled in clean oil refrigerated to 15C & then tempered for exactly 22 minutes at 454C. For example. It just strikes me that the qualitative difference may be discernible by actual measurements whereas the calcs say they're same-same...

You know, if Guzzi is going to refuse to put the 4v heads on the small blocks, then they should plan on supercharging the poor beast. They've already jumped the huge hurdle of EFI, so slapping a blower on there should be a straight up engineering task that would enable them to stay competitive w/ more modern designs. And blowers don't have the problems that turbos do for motorcycles [as everyone found to their dismay back in the 80s during the "moto-turbo boom."] It's funny that Guzzi has never gone there before*: after all, the only reason that manufacturers gave up on forced induction was the changes the FIM made to GP rules after 1939, and Guzzi gave up GP racing in 1957? 58?; anyway, a long time ago. No reason not to use the obvious solution on street bikes when they have no plans to race them, right? * - This doesn't include their works GP 3cyl that they never got to race because of the outbreak of WWII; I'm talking production machines here!

I remember the 1st time I saw a dual-headlight setup on a bike [late 80s Suzuki, iirc] & thinking to myself how much better it was from the standpoint of conspicuity: there was no way that an on-coming cager could mistake the rider for another car. OTOH, I think the "bugeyed" look of the Triumph is hideous. I've always thought a 3-lamp setup [two round upper lights aimed down for low beams, one lower lamp aimed further up the road for a high beam] would be pretty sweet, but discovered that there's a DOT rule against an odd# ( >1 ) of headlamps on a vehicle [left over from the days of the Tucker automobile & Detroit's effort to quash it no doubt! ]

Reminds me of my friend Thom Irwin's Ghezzi, "el Chupacabra" altho' as I recall his had the blue bodywork and black frame [but my remembry plays funny trix sometimes... ] Beautiful bikes, too bad Guzzi never saw fit to bring G&B's designs in-house & make them official production [& therefore, affordable!

Wow. I hadn't heard that statistic. Ironic too, as I'd reached the conclusion on my own some years ago that the top exec shouldn't be making more than 32x the lowest worker in the company (2**5; any company w/ more than 4 layers of management has too many chiefs & not enuf injuns!) Shortly after reaching this conclusion on my lonesome, I remember learning that a top economist [i think it was the Nobel laureate who won the prize for elucidating "why people save" sometime back in the 50s; prize was granted in '91, iirc? Economics don't get no respect... ] had stated that top execs shouldn't be paid more than 20x the lowest worker's rate. That made me feel pretty good, since my # was pretty much just a WAG based on my observations from my own working life. No wonder the 80s were so much better than today, despite the general lack of cell phones & the 'net!

Do you think the stockholders are pleased at this? It's more a function of "decreasing the flow of red ink, so that the top brass can claim they'd done something to justify their overly generous compensation packages..." Just so you know, I am a stockholder, & no, I'm not pleased...

!@#$ batrastards have a US-based shop... that doesn't carry the saddlebags! Grrr...

That's 'cause you live in a GREAT FUCKING DESERT w/ ocean all 'round it. And the prevailing winds got hung up off the coast of Peru due to some little kid or something. Sorry. Never fret: next year when the winds get started up again (with a vengeance), you'll likely be complaining about the typhoons!

Hey, when you take the perfect product placement pic, what do you expect? Email them & state that you want attribution, I'm sure they'll play nicely. I mean, it's not like you'd be asking for money, and it's only fair that you get credit [both for the lovely V11 and the nice pic!]

You going to mask off everything around it & spray it w/ a layer of clear laquer to keep it from re-oxidizing again? Or at least rub some sunscreen on it?

I believe I came across a reference to use of the 15M in an automotive application early on; it is after all, rated to control up to 4 cylinders. IIRC, it was a FIAT model never exported to the U.S., so that kind of quelled any hope of auto-based control modifier hardware [which given comparative production #s, would have been cheaper than PCIII or similar bike-based solutions...]

Well, there's lots of questions involved w/ "why not?" How well distributed is knowledge of its existence? What physical parameters associated with its use [castable, wrought, heat treatment concerns?] For instance, if it can *only* be cast, then that limits its applicability. And lastly, how long has this alloy been available? Like most proprietary products, widespread application will only occur once it becomes public domain; until then, it will only see comparatively limited use.

Wanna bet?

I think we call'em "cr@p cookies that don't sell: pass me those Mother's circus animals over there" over here...

Krylon makes a paint esp. for plastics... maybe buy a can & test it on a hidden spot on the bag material to make certain it will work ok? Who knows, maybe you stuff the bags full of whatever, spray'em w/ the paint & you end up w/ hard bags 4 cheap!

Something to bear in mind: the Harley XLCR ('77-'79) is highly collectable, despite being little more than a tarted-up Iron Head Sposta, w/ all that entails: cr@p brakes, vibration to loosen your fillings, cr@p handling, clunky 4-spd, etc. I think the end-of-run Buells will be collectable, as long as they're ridden little and kept warm indoors. 10 or 15 years from now when all we're allowed are electric mopeds and the 2nd American Revolution has been lost & the UN has taken all our guns away, the Buells will be a hot property in the classic bike shows as a tangible reminder of what we've lost...