callison

At the crimp. You can't get the damned thing back together very easily either. My solution was to gut the lamp housing saving only the outside metal part and put a white LED in there instead. Basically, I just took the LED, soldered a 1/16 watt 680 Ω (I think it was 1/16W, whatever it was, it was very small) resistor to the positive lead and soldered that to a small brass strip to act as the terminal. The two leads were insulated and then the LED and leads wound up in black duct tape until they fit snugly into the metal housing. The negative lead was folded over the outside of the tape plug before it was inserted into the original outer metal shell. The finished lamp gives a very spooky Cherenkov blue radiation look to the instruments.

If it were made of steel, a fall on the lever would probably bend the shifter mechanism or fracture the transmission case. J. Kenny does make a replacement shift lever, I have one on my V11 Sport project.

Mine did that exactly once when I had about 21,000 miles on it. That didn't make sense, but I had taken the tank off the day before, so I went looking for the culprit. In this specific instance, the tank had been converted to a standard petcock which requires re-routing the fuel line. There was quite a bit of strain tangent to the spigot departure angle, so when the fuel line itself got enough heat to soften up a tad - it kinked. Re-routing the fuel line cured that problem. This recurring vapor lock issue always seems to be attributed to the fuel pump and its location. MG has moved the pump to several locations, finally immersing it in the tank. Al has tried a number of novel plumbing approaches as have several other people. There doesn't seem to be a total consistency in the results. Perhaps the problem is not the pump, but the electric petcock. The solenoid actuator on there could be failing after its internally generated heat plus the heat from the engine is more than it can accommodate. Of course, if this is the case, and all of MG's maneuvering the pump location didn't help, when the pump was moved to the tank, that particular petcock part was removed as part of the design, and it would have cured the problem. In the most expensive way - by completely redesigning the tank and its associated parts. I make no claim that this is the actual problem, only that it is a possible alternative culprit.

I've generally gotten about 41-44 mpg on either the Sport 1100i or the V11 Sport during the summer. This is for a commute that has about 30 miles of fairly consistent driving speeds (total round trip is 106 miles of which 20 is in the city). In the winter, it drops significantly but never below 38 mpg. Go out and whack the throttle a bunch in a nice twisty road and I can expect 35-40 mpg (I don't ride that hard). Get on a freeway and drone along at constant speed and I've seen 51 mpg @ 79 mph several times.

Did you have a front tire replaced lately? It's really easy to bend a rotor when the wheel assembly is off the bike. Don't ask how I know.

Well, my attempt to do it cheaply as described in the posts above, simply didn't work. Since then, I've put Kisan SM-2's in four of my Guzzis. Expensive, but convenient. Sometimes, it just pays to do what works and not bluster about expending time trying to do it a different and less effective way.

Al's approach should work until the second stud breaks loose. Tach failure occur for other reasons as well, but the starting point is to remove it from the bike and wiggle the case mounting studs. Hopefully, that's all there is, as that is a tedious, but cheap fix. If the IC is fried, there are no commercial equivalents for it that I've found. Here's a past post of mine from another forum. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First posted sometime in early 2003: I did my California tach two months ago and it is better than new for needle stability. I found the same to be true for the 97 Sport when I did that a few years ago. The problem with a lot of these tachs is that the case mounting studs are the ground return path for the meter movement. Although there are three wires going to the tach and one of them is a ground lead, it is apparently only a ground lead for the electronics - not the meter movement itself. What happens is the tachometer case mounting studs are a press fit into the case with an interference mechanical fit. If they were welded there wouldn't be a problem, but they tend to fracture the mechanical bond after a while screwing up the meter operation. Not everyone has this specific problem, sometimes the meter movement counterweights unglue and fall into the bottom. Beyond the scope of my experience for that one. It can be repaired though, and for not much money, but requires some patience and if the tach is under warranty, I would push for replacement rather than repairing it myself. As for removing the tach to begin with? On the California, it's a bit of a nuisance. For the 97 California, remove the headlight, the crosspiece between the tach and speedometer and the other housing screw at the rear of the tach as well as the rear cover of the instrument light cluster. Inside the cluster is a screw into the tach housing. Remove that and as I recall (I am going from memory here and I have certifiable CRS - Can't Remember S?it) you can remove the tach and detach the wires. Putting it back on is an amount of fun equal to or greater than the original process. Be sure to have beer available to relieve the stress but take care to not imbibe so much that the process becomes impossible. The (somewhat) easy part is next. Lay the tach face down on a piece of cardboard or an old dishtowel (go ahead, use a clean dish towel, just don't expect me to explain it to your wife...) and using a very small flat blade screwdriver, start prying the bezel lip upwards away from the tach case that it is rolled over on. Just do a little bit, move a few degrees around the case and do it again. A little bit of lift each time. After you've gone around once or twice, you can use a bigger flat blade screwdriver to pry the bezel lip to a nearly vertical position. Once you can pull the bezel off of the tach housing, you remove the three screws on the back of the tach housing and remove the guts. Set them aside. Look into the housing and you'll see that the mounting studs are one of those assembly line press fits. There is a very high probability that either or both of them wiggle a tad (or if you have had too many beers before tightening the tach onto the mounts, a stud has pulled completely loose. One of mine was. I'm special, I don't need the beers as I am digitally dyslexic and ambi-klutztrous). Any movement whatsoever is an indication that the ground path is screwed up electrically and the stud needs to be re-secured. Since very few of us have the skill or equipment to heliarc the damn thing in place, only a really good epoxy will do. Use a metal loaded one to help with electrical conductivity - something like JB Weld in the USA and who knows what anywhere else. A dab on the outside of the case and a large gob on the inside. Let it sit the full cure time - you don't want to do this twice. Put the guts back in and with the bezel face down on the towel, or yesterdays newspaper since your wife caught you using her favorite towel with the little house and white picket fence on it and you're now out in a cold garage with no beer because she took that away too, and gently start bending the bezel lip back down around the tach housing. A bit at a time and work your way around. At some point it becomes possible to take a wooden stick or something similar and a small hammer finish mashing the lip down tight to the tach case. That's pretty much it, put the silly thing all back together (the California's have some pretty berserk mounting hardware) on the bike and take it for a ride. You should get a rock solid reading. In accordance with Vaguelia specifications, all Moto Guzzi's are perpetual motion machines. I can prove it. The tach always reads at least 500 rpm. I didn't care to try and fix that.

I've got a sport type battery in my California. Never had a problem, even with heated grips and vest. It allowed me to move the computer. Eventually, I'll get the seat lowered an addition 2.5" because now I have the clearance to do so. Yet another project waiting in the wings...

There's quite a lot on the web about it, here's a search link if you want. http://msxml.webcrawler.com/info.wbcrwl/se...eb/hunter%2Buav Basically, the Hunter UAV uses two Guzzi manufactured 750cc engines in a push-pull configuration. During the first few years, the engines suffered a lot of failures (apparently owed to running at 100%+ for hours at a time) giving the program a bad rep. If you look around on the web for pictures of the Guzzi museum in Mandello, there are usually some good shots of the UAV engine.

http://home.pacbell.net/guzzi007/tps/TPS.html

Okay. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume the engineers that designed the V11 Sport knew what they were doing. First off, since the V11 Sport had the new transmission, the rear end had to be redesigned, it shouldn't have any measurements in common with anything built before. Any assumptions that it would be the same as a Sport 1100i, an Eldorado or anything else are unlikely to be true. It would be perfectly logical to assume that at the time of design, the intended position for the swingarm would be to be centered between the side plates. There would be three positions that always be certain, full left, full right and mid-point in between the two and my guess is that the center is the intended location as full up against either side would invite parts rubbing together. That said, I used a digital depth gauge to set my swingarm. I loosened one side pin and then used the other side to push the swingarm up against the sideplate. Then I ran in the loose pin until it just stopped. Then I measured the length of the threads protruding out of the side plate. Then I reversed the process and measured the amount of threads protruding on that same pin. I seem to recall that the movement is something like 4 millimeters (bad memory, so don't hold me to this). Dividing the two thread depths gets you the desired measurement to center the swingarm. Then all you have to do is back out the pin (the deepest one in) that amount and spin the other side in until there is no play and no excessive side load on the bearings.

Why limit it to California? Of all of the western states in the USA, California has the worst road maintenance. Marcial and I have fond memories of the blast down Hwy 138 in Oregon going from Crater Lake to Roseburg. We rode Hwy 36 in California the day before that. No comparison. 36 was great, but 138 was nothing short of fantastic. I have ridden other roads in California that I consider to be equivalent to Hwy 36, but not as lengthy. BTW, Hwy 36 has exactly ONE gas station at about 2/3rd's of the way from I5 to the coast. And that is just about at the fumes stage on a V11 Sport. It is a really good ride though, once you're past the logging trucks and the occasional road construction.

Ah ha! So if that is/was a spot for an oil pump - and BMW can build an oil-cooled cylinder head... There is no reason that that location couldn't be plumbed for a water pump though. Makes you kind of wonder.

I have my project bike together enough to find that the Sport plate is off 1 cm. It turns out (as Paul had mentioned to me) that the V11 Sport had the engine shifted back onto centerline of the bike where the Sport 1100/1100i's had the engine offset to the right to add clearance for the wider rear wheel. So... the plate cannot really be mounted unless you're willing to move the two top holes over towards the center by 1 cm - which would have one of them out in space somewhere. Drat. Sorry for the bad news for those of you that bought a plate. I bought a used one, but it's still $15 detoured from more worthwhile endeavors.

Dunno. Snug ought to be enough. It's only job is to keep the pin from rotating.

The WP shock itself is a straight in replacement. The remote reservoir is longer than the Sachs though, and won't fit in the same location easily if at all. I'm still fighting with this one myself.

I think the answer is no torque at all, just zero play.

I had Raask rear sets on my BMW R65 and my Yamaha 650 Seca many years ago. They're okay. Nothing more.

Ever wonder how much improvement radial calipers would offer with the stock V11 rotors? Better feel of rotor warps perhaps. I'm not knocking the radials, but I don't ride in a mode where the radials would offer all that much improvement. As they said, stock brake systems are quite good as they are.

He's got the Road and Track forks on ebay as well.

Wow. 94 Octane. Californians are lucky to find anything over 91. Ping ping ping...

4 valve engines can be bored to 100mm (no push rod tubes). 2 valve engines can (safely) be bored to 95mm, 97 if you don't intend it to last long and certainly not for the street. The 4 valve heads are a special alloy (which is why the Daytona's were so late getting to market originally). The heads on the 2 valve cannot really dissipate the heat from about more than 100hp. Either engine can be stroked to 82mm, so I'll let you do your own math. Power and reliability do not usually go hand in hand, so you need to keep that in mind when modifying any engine and more so if this is the only bike you have and you want to ride it frequently without a lot of maintenance fuss. Should you ever find the opportunity to remove the front engine cover on your big block, the casting has a spot for a cam driven pump. Probably intended for a water cooled engine that never made it to production.

You need to buy a Daytona RS or if one isn't available, turn a Centauro into a Daytona RS. It has been done before. The similarities of the V11 Sports and the Sport 1100's abound, but there are very few identical pieces and that would hold true for the Daytonas as well. They really aren't the same bike so I'm not surprised that they felt so different to you. http://daytonasite.free.fr/english/daytona_website.htm

That's sort of the inverse of a thread on the Australian Guzzi forum a few weeks ago about fitting late model wheels to the Tonti frame bikes. My 97 California sports an 18" front wheel and I suspect the later tubeless rims are the same size. The would probably mean the front wheel wouldn't fit. The rear might though as it is 17". Rim sizes: - Front: 18"x2,50 - B40 - TC e DOT - Rear: 17"x3,50 - 40 - TR e DOT. Tires - Front: 110/90 - 18 - 61 H/61 V/61 VB - Rear: 140/80 - 17 - 69H/69V/69VB

The bore on the Mistrals is much larger than the stock pipes. What works for pipe organs undoubtedly applies here as well. Bass notes like larger openings, so unpacking the stock pipes will only go so far, probably reducing back pressure somewhat, but not making a significant change in the timbre of the sound.