callison

Ah ah ah now, lets not be too critical. I've put 120,000 miles on my Guzzi's in the last 7 years, 5 of them year round. I just finally got tired of the inconvenience and bought a car with some character. I couldn't afford a taxi for a 52 mile commute to work anyway.

What's odd about it? Your first 3 choices are pretty much in line with what I'd consider candidates for my next bike if I get one. I'd skip the FJ simply because my riding skills don't go that far.

I have a calcified tendon in my left shoulder. Surgical consult on the 19th. This ain't gonna be my year. Oddly enough, it hasn't actually been a bad year, it's just getting difficult to hit the marks on my way to retirement in a few months. I wish the woman SUV driver hadn't parked her stupid gas guzzler on top of my Toyota Prius though. It's going to take months to get that repaired. Meanwhile, because the doctor has prohibited riding the bike for at least a month, I'll have to rent a car.

Some direction or the other. This was 3 years ago and I don't even want to think about the amount of trouble that particular clutch rebuild caused me. I got so PO'd I left the bike in pieces for 18 months.

The e coli infection is in the prostate. A motorcycle seat is a great irritant for this one. I sort of want to keep my prostate. Even more than my bikes...

Well, it was on my schedule, then I got the e coli thing and the doctor says no way. Maybe I can drift back from Oklahoma for the SoCal rally this autumn.

Because dammit, I'm at home with an e coli infection and it will be months before the doctor will allow me to ride a bike again. I like you guys and all and I wouldn't miss this forum for the world, but... I want to ride my bike!

An 01 LeMans? I thought they started with 02. At least in the USA they did. I think. Maybe. Well, whatever, welcome to the fold. Good people, good bikes, good fun.

Guzzi's are great booming handful of fun between 5000 rpm and redline. I almost never get above 4200 rpm for around town though, partially to save fuel, but mostly to save wallet as tickets are prohibitively expensive. But up in the mountains - ohboy ohboy ohboy...

Ah, the infamous "Cobra" exhaust of Captain Nemo of Seattle. He used to flail at this board and has been banished or shunned off, but you can probably search for a thread or go to wildguzzi.com on the forum there where he periodically surfaces. He has a web site called "Rolling Crows" or something, so perhaps a web search will turn him up that way. He offered to get more exhausts made for around $800, which isn't out of line, but claimed a perfectly flat torque curve as a result of his "design" that most knowledgeable individuals would suggest isn't quite possible. Until someone besides Captain Nemo actually does performance analysis on that system, we'll never know. I thought it was a very nice looking system though.

My Dad flew C-123's for Air America in Laos during the mid-sixties. Yes, the same type in the movie with Mel Gibson and no, nothing in the movie except the opening sequence with the Pilatus Porter landing on an improbable hillside strip, resembles anything I remember about Laos when I lived there as a teenager. That movie is universally despised by anyone that was there. But I digress. My father landed at a remote strip (very short and made of mud) to pick up a caterpillar D9. One look at it and he said it would be beyond the weight capacity of the aircraft. The dipshit that had scheduled the flight was along and insisted that the vehicle be placed aboard the aircraft. My Dad said okay, but remove the wheels (heavy) after it was loaded and the wheels would have to remain behind. This was done and all would have been just fine, but while my Dad wasn't looking, Mr. Dipshit had the laborers load the wheels back onto the aircraft just before closing the ramp door. When the overladen aircraft went to take off, it wasn't more than a foot off of the ground at the end of the strip despite being at maximum power. The aircraft bounced off an earth berm at the end of the runway and struggled into the air, barely making it back to base. My Dad was furious, he almost killed Mr. Dipshit. Mr Dipshit did this frequently, hopping rides to try and get enough air time for his commercial license as well impress somebody with his scheduling ability to get over limit loads on to aircraft. Eventually, he managed to overload a plane to the point where it went down killing him and everyone else on the aircraft. I'm very grateful that my father was not on that flight.

Okay, you see the part in picture #2? It slides forward off of the splines in picture #1 and freewheels about the shaft, picking up rotational velocity with friction and then spinning to a stop after the engine has ceased rotation. Capiche? It sounds like a roulet wheel, yet the clutch can seem to be working quite normally. In reality, you now have a single plate clutch, well, there are two, but only one actually engages to the shaft to impart any energy. The outer portion of the clutch plate (picure #3), now that it's separated from the center "spider", remains captured in the clutch assembly and does not indicate any noticeable unbalance for this kind of failure. If the clutch plate surfaces come unbonded, then there will be lots of vibration and pieces at the bottom of the bell housing. For a while, Guzzi on riveted the plate material. That failed. So they bonded it. And that failed. Now MG both rivets and bonds them and the plate material stays put under nearly all normal circumstances. So, the center part breaks instead. The clutch in my California probably gave out because I took the bike into a fairly spirited ride with Mike Stewart and others at the Prescott Rally 4 years ago. Lots of strain from shifting near redline etc. Great fun but mechanically non-trivial when the parts fail. The California's/EV's etc are NO fun to pull the swingarm on. The V11 Sports and even the slightly less refined (but ever so much more svelte looking - but not weighing) Sport 1100i/Daytona RS bikes are very much superior from a chassis maintenance standpoint. Except for that foward zerk fitting on the driveshaft. PITA that one.

Buy them both

Just don't throw the hardware away. The smog fiends, especially in California, can make your life miserable if the bike is being inspected for any reason. Moto Italiano had somehow messed up the registration for my V11 Sport for the PO, so I had to have a member of the local law enforcement examine the frame numbers and yes, he did check out thouroughly the smog decal and all of the various parts to ensure that they were still in place. He wouldn't have signed off on the registration fix either had it been missing.

Hmm... maybe pictures will make more sense than words. The clutch plate breaks at the center plate. The broken center piece can migrate off of the clutch hub and can spin about the engine shaft - the whirring sound. If this were all that it did, you could just keep riding for a while, but unfortunately, the broken piece can grind at the face of the case. Incidentally, this is from a 97 California, but the clutch plates (latest version) are the same as those on the V11 Sports with dual plate clutches.

The Aston Martin DB4 Vantage from the movie Goldfinger is still running around somewhere in the USA - probably California. This is one car where the driver can imagine he's James Bond.

Okay DeBenGuzzi, I note your vast compassion for fellow Guzzisti. Robbrugg. If the bike is still rolling, it's one clutch plate which is unfortunately, at MGNA's incredibly over-inflated prices, about $200. It's not a lot of fun to change out, but I would guess that I could do a V11 Sport in one very long day. If I add beer, one very long weekend. My spare plate (used) is in storage along with about half of my household goods in Oklahoma or I'd offer to send it to you. Go talk to the gents at Renaissance Cycles, they're good folks.

Betcha it's a broken clutch plate. I just realized this post is the same bike I just answered this on on WildGuzzi. At least a spine frame is a whole bunch easier to get to the clutch on than a California. Same clutch though.

Thanks Tom. Oddly enough, this washer is HUGE! It doesn't fit anywhere on the bike that I can discern, yet it turned up in the box of V11 Sport parts while I had the bike apart. The ID is nearly a centimeter larger than OD of the axle. The washer didn't fit in the steering head either (the whole bike was apart). It is now in a box somewhere in storage. Just one of those mystery parts I suppose.

This is sad. I'm glad I don't live where Guzzis have enough popularity to be stolen for parts. I wonder if the green sport had been retro-fitted with Ohlins.

I'll never get over how ungainly and just plain ugly that tank looks. Other than that, it looks like a really nice evolvement of the basic Guzzi. I wonder if a V11 Sport tank would fit...

Beautiful. If a body kit for the Breva 1100 could be constructed, that would make for an interesting version. I mention the newer bike partially because of the swingarm (for appearance, not necessarily for better performance or reduced weight), the somewhat more advanced 2 valve engine and the fact that current production items have better parts support than discontinued models/engnes. I could probably spring for a body kit etc, but acquiring a 4 valver would be difficult and the possibility of a future parts shortage is something to consider. The earlier spine frames aren't exactly light either and embarking on a program of weight reduction etc would be expensive. Maybe a Ghezzi Brian as the basis would be more suitable.

Somewhere, in the back of some cretin's van, there's a Daytona and a bunch of Ohlins forks...

If they're going to drop all of the Tonti frame models and the current spine frames, they had better get the naked and full-tour versions of the Breva 1100 introduced post-haste. MG ought to offer a lightweight dual sport based on the Breva 750 too, but I rather suspect that any dual sport at this point would use the Aprilia 450 v-twin four stroke. That wouldn't be a bad choice either but it would be a long way from what's currently considered traditional for an Guzzi.

Doesn't look like anything I have seen while taking off the wheel on my V11 Sport. Of course, I have no idea what size your washer is either, you should include some measurements. Having said all of this, I too have a washer remaining - a huge thin flat washer. No clue where it came from either.