callison

Sorry Al, I misinterpreted what you were saying. My theory on the idle blurble (and pure conjecture it is too!) is that the very low air speed velocity through the throttle bodies at idle allows fuel to fall out of mixture and puddle in the intake. Eventually, it does something and the engine coughs.

Oh really? 20,400+ miles and it's still there as big as ever. Correct TPS setting seems to be the best remedy - but not the cure. I'm going to baldly state that it's the program in the ECU. I cannot yet substantiate that statement. If the missing and coughing on a V11 Sport are bad, then on a Sport 1100i the problem is absolutely evil. When my Sporti is running again, it goes to the Cliff Jeffries computer for comparison, but even with the valves screwed up, Cliff's computer did not seem to exhibit the rpm hiccup. I have hopes to verify that the problem is the ECU programming. I'm still a couple of months away from having heads back though. I have one other option for the V11 Sport. I have in my hot, grubby little fingers, a Weber Marelli IAW1.5M for a California (version C1, the V11 Sport uses the C5 variant, Stones the C3 etc.). Still in the original bag. It does work on a V11 Sport (fired right up when I tried it), but the mapping is bound to be different and that may be the magic bullet. After I return from the National, I'll put a few commute days on it to see what it does. Having a spare ECU is rarity, getting one off of eBay for $22.50 is absurd, but it happened. I have a spare tach too. Despite what an ECU costs ($748 list in the USA), for what I paid for the eBay one, I could send the eBay ECU to Cliff and have him redesign his board to fit the WM case and give that a try as well. Think of it! A whole cottage industry could spring up around gutting Weber Marelli boxes and putting in competent electronics. One thing at a time though, for now, the spare ECU remains exactly that. The Breva shows absolutely NONE of these problems. When the 1200 version arrives next year, it will be damned interesting to see if the factory finally makes the correct design choices for the big block engines or whether they'll continue the tradition of marking off serious flaws as "character".

Scott, for your bike I think I would get your dealer on your side and push MGNA to just replace the bike. If you're taking it to Moto International for service, they're supposed to be really good, and if they can't make this beast reliable it must be a lemon. Sorry. I put a wonderful 47,000 miles on my Sport 1100i before it started giving me problems and I have 20,000 on the V11 Sport. For the last 2 or 3 thousand miles, the V11 Sport wouldn't idle very well either (idle well? it didn't idle at all, I kept the fast idle lever full on always). I set the valves, changed the plugs and made an appointment to have the TPS set by the shop in Sacramento. $70 straight up and now the bike runs like a charm. As it turned out, the TPS was at 1.9˚ when it should have been at 3.6 - 3.8˚. The 2500-3500 hiccup is still there of course, but it's pretty subdued compared to before. I'm fairly certain the hiccup is bad programming on Marelli's part.

I had a nice conversation with Mike Rich yesterday, he being the premier Guzzi head porting fellow in the USA, if you're not familiar with the name. He states, quite adamantly, that every Moto Guzzi big block V11 head built since 1995 has soft valve stems. About 28 Rockwell. He won't install anything less than 38 Rockwell or harder. He has a set of heads in his shop (not mine) that have .0015" wear after only 4000 miles. They shouldn't be more than .0005" wear with a lot more miles than that. Mine are the worst he's seen yet at .0035" and 57,233 miles. That valve was so sloppy in the valve guide that it rocked and acted like a cutting tool and chewed up the valve seat. The guide is so loose, exhaust gases used that as an escape route leaving a carbon trail in the port, outside of the port, down the pushrod tunnel and maybe into the block. Carbon so thick and dense that it couldn't be bead blasted off, and chemical removal wasn't entirely successful either. Meaning the remainder will have to be removed by hand when he gets to my heads in a couple of weeks. Now I have to pull my cylinders and see if the tappet and pushrod bore are ruined. That could require replacing the block. I'm not telling you all this to brag about how bad my bike is. I'm putting this out here because we all need to keep an eye on our valves. They can go bad in a very short period of time. Now, does anyone have Ivan Beggio's email address? I want to email him directly about using better quality parts.

I would say you're okay. On the Sport 1100i, the gearbox lubrication intervals are 10,000 miles (16,000km). Both the transmission and the rear box have magnet drain plugs and I've never really seen much debris on either one. The V11 Sport has a 6000 mile interval, but I suspect that was done just to put in synch with the shop period when setting the valves. I haven't been using moly either, but I have been using engine assembly lube instead, which I think has moly in it, with good results for about 96,000 across three bikes. I also run the BMW synthetic gearbox lube for motorcycles. In combination with the assembly lube, the concoction is so slippery I have had correctly torqued drain and sight plugs back out and drop off of the bike as the lube migrates up the threads of the plug. I now put teflon pipe tape on the last part of the threads and safety wire the sight and drain plugs to each other. Hope this helps.

No. I post frequently here, the Australian board, Wildguzzi and MGNOC.

I've been trying to contact Hank Blackstock since last August when he paid me a vist (and took me out to Kenny Roberts ranch!). He seems to have disappeared. I hope he's well, he hasn't posted hear since September 4th of last year.

I went up to Performance Cycles in Sacramento California Saturday to get my TPS adjusted and purchase some stuff as well as ride the Breva. The Breva was really sweet. After adjusting the TPS, the dealer couldn't get the bike to start. So all of the relays were replaced under warranty. Five more minutes of trying produced a start, so the bike was moved to the parking lot. Then I couldn't get it to start. Five minutes of fiddling with the relays didn't accomplish anything. Then it started. I went to lunch. It started. I rode the 86 miles home and stopped for gas two miles from the house. Then it wouldn't start again and I finally called home for a ride and got my trailer. No room to work on bike in garage. Too many Guzzi's. Shed kit sitting alongside house. Time to put it up. 34 bags of gravel later (at 50lbs each), several trips to the hardware store for stakes and wood and such, I start putting up the shed. Night falls with only the walls up, shed foundation not level, floor doesn't like sitting on gravel. Sunday, tear down shed. More gravel. Re-level foundation, put down vapor barrier. Run out of staples. Switch to wifes stapler out of desk. Run out of vapor barrier material. Run to hardware store, buy staples and more plastic stuff. Put plywood down. Start putting up shed again. Wrong parts in box for roof. Back across town to where I bought the shed. Get correct parts. Finish shed. Put Ambassador and Sport 1100i in shed. Move California (now also inoperative with main seal leak and fuel leaks) alongside of house along with V65C. Now there's room in the garage. Eventually, I found the problem. After taking apart most of the handlebars, relay brackets and some other stuff, it was probably one of two things (they both got undone at the same time). The clutch safety switch, or the connectors to the clutch safety switch. I believe it was the connectors this time. They are under the gas tank, snuggled down behind the left handlebar connector and stuff on the left side of the spine. There are two itty bitty wires. One grey, the other black. The grey and black wires go into a pair of bullet connectors, both of which are white/black, one is fed by the "Start" switch when that is pressed, and the other side feeds the coil to the starter relay switch. Alternatively, it could have been the clutch switch itself. It is a bit exposed and if you hit a very large insect, or a bird or a rock or some such, and the switch got pushed in closer to the clutch lever, it would put the switch in the wrong position to operate. Now I have to put the bike back together. It was a very long weekend...

That's pretty much what Brent Prindle was aiming for on his Sport 1100i http://www.motointernational.com/project.html. The last time I corressponded with him, he said the dual plugged heads were consistently giving him more than 50mpg. Lots of power is neat - if you have a place to use it, otherwise, 99.8% of the time you're just running the bike and strong but efficient is a valid choice.

Check out some of the Ducati pegs. They have some with rubber tops. How much vibration they absorb though.

That's because they're under the section for the race bike. They are not available from MG Cycle and according to that page, they're loaners. I don't know where they originated from, but I bet Mike Rich would know. I think I've seen them somewhere as well, but I'll be danged if I can remember where.

On my Sport 1100i, I regularly got 7500 miles per set of Pirelli MTR23/24's. That bike is a tad lighter than the V11 Sport and the tire sizes a bit different as well. Oddly enough, the Sport 1100i fairing creates enough downwards force that the front tire wears out at nearly the same rate as the rear tire. On my V11 Sport, the front lasts a bunch longer. Currently, I am running Metzeler M1 Sportecs. I like these tires and they seem to be good for at least 5000 on the rear and probably 7-8 thousand on the front.

Jason, you needn't be embarrassed. Of the five I have, only two are actually useable, the V65 and the V11 Sport. I went to use the California this week and lo and behold - big oil puddle underneath!!! Rear main seal. So, I get to repeat the February self flagellation exercise of taking the bike apart, but now I have to get even deeper into it. Unfortunately, there are now so many bikes in the garage, I don't have room to work on it, so I'm leveling a spot in the yard and putting in a shed just to store the bikes that aren't running. Maybe I should have bought two sheds...

Well Murray, like I said. "I think", based on the best information I've been able to dredge up off of the net, which isn't a lot. 90,000km is a tad less than the 57,214 miles on mine and 120,000km is a bunch more. There are at least 2 or 3 other Sports in the USA that have more miles than mine, so I popped a number as a guess. Mea Culpa. The bike is still definitely a high mileage spine frame. The 1100 Sports have been around years longer than the FI models, they should have a higher population of high mileage bikes. I bought my Sport 1100i new just 5 years ago this month. In that five years, I didn't ride it for 11 months after carpal tunnel surgeries and only put 3000 miles on it the last 14 months because it ran so badly. It gets used, it's my favorite bike. I bought the V11 Sport last June. I'll have 20,000 miles on it this month as well. I put 20,000 miles on the California in the last 18 months too. Now consider the issue of the original post. ALL of the big block engines (Californias, Stones, EV's, Bassa's - what have you) have a likely potential for valve seat damage due to poor materials. And I'm racking up miles (or is that wracking...?) on three big blocks. That poor valve material is going to cost me three times. And I don't have a car to fall back upon. I better get the Bugswatter back together soon as one of the others may be next.

Good idea. Thank him for the warning from all of us.

I was (and remain) clueless as to how you check valve guide wear. I opted to leave heads on the entire time I had the bike and only torqued them occasionally while doing the valves on a regular schedule. The Bugswatter has always been a bitch to keep running smoothly. When she decided to not run below 3000 rpm at all, I knew there were additional problems. I tried a different tps sender, checked all of the sensors and re-wired for dual ECU's so I could try Cliff Jeffries My16M. Cliff's computer improved stuff somewhat, but there was something so fundamentally wrong with the engine, that it had to be mechanical and that means the top end. So, I pulled them apart and sent them off to Mike. I had a significant carbon trail from the left guide to the crankcase vents, so that would be one thing to look for prior to taking the heads off. Also, some of the washers and such were carboned into place and difficult to remove. As I posted earlier, Mike said mine were some of the worst he's ever seen. Unfortunately, it seems that all of the big block Guzzis have this problem. Mine was exacerbated by high mileage. I think I was #3 or 4 worldwide for high mileage on a spine frame when I tore it down.

My heads had 57,214 miles on them when I sent them off. That's just... a bit... more... than you guys . Mike said the exhaust valve had acted as a cutting tool and did a fine job of sinking the seat into the head. Providing the head isn't cracked, it can be salvaged. Otherwise, he'll find a core. These are going to be some very expensive heads by the time they're returned. Now I have to send him the rocker arms for inspection and/or re-grinding as well.

Just now getting around to replying. There was a guy on the v11lemans site in Texas who made a bunch of springs after he suffered the same problem twice. Then he disappeared from sight. I did buy one of his springs though, and it has a less abrupt radius so it shouldn't fail like the stock one has. I have a 2001 V11SportTT and apparently, I won't need the spring as the problems showed up with the 2002 year. I just looked in my desk drawer and I do still actually have it (the spring) and you're welcome to it, just email me your address so I know where to ship it to.

There have been a few instances of broken motor mount weld points and weld fractures on the front/steering head sub-frame on the earlier Sport 1100s. Worth checking anyhow, as it would be very dangerous to have a failure while riding.

I sent the heads of the Bugswatter off to Mike Rich a couple of months ago. I got a call yesterday that he'd finally unpacked them and did a preliminary check out. My left exhaust valve seat was the worst he'd ever seen on a square fin. The guide was so loose the valve hammered the seat into the head. Small wonder the bike wouldn't idle or run below 3000 rpm. Mine is probably the highest mileage square fin he's seen, but he has seen damage nearly as bad in as little as 4000 miles on Guzzi engines. The upshot of this is. The valve and guide materials MG uses are not optimum, maybe not even good. You can expect the soft valve stems to wear with the guides running loose as a result and seeing damage at some point in the life of your engine. There is probably no guideline as to how many miles is crucial, some riders, like Ken Hand, go hundreds of thousands of miles without problems, others get less than ten thousand and things go bad. A compression check on my engine did not reveal this problem, but it sure ran lousy and no amount of tinkering seemed to improve it.

I don't know what year that 5 speed illustration is from, but from at least 1997 until now, that rubber hose and fitting are gone and have been replaced by a plug.

The fuel filter may have the input side at the top so that particulate matter doesn't migrate downhill into the pump when the bike is off. Speculation on my part.

As I understood it, the brass body just changes the thermal transit time. Plastic for the USA to meet EPA stuff. I think the sensor elements themselves are the same.

The early spine frames had an air pressure sensor external to the ECU. I believe that on the V11 Sports and later, the sensor is actually on the ECU board and a line is simply run to the airbox. You should be able to discard the line entirely if you want, but I would put a short loop of line on it just to preclude moisture intrusion.

98 octane? The best you can get in California (and I doubt if it's even that) is 91. Ping Ping Ping... Stall.