GuzziMoto

First I would make sure it is not an external issue. There is an adjuster screw where the lever pushes on the master cylinder piston. If that is mis-adjusted that could likely cause your issue. Plus there is the obvious adjustment of the lever itself. Have you flushed / bled / changed the clutch fluid?

The stock V11 wheels are pretty heavy as well. I would not be surprised if you were able to build some spoke wheels that were as light or lighter than the stock V11 wheels.

I am happy to see Guzzi do anything that is thinking outside the box. They can do a three cylinder diesel. The can do a v4, a single or a twin.... It is all good, as long as it is a true Moto Guzzi effort and not a re-badged Aprilia. I would love for them to build a motor other than a V twin. That double V 3 cylinder they use in drone planes was cool. I would love to see them do something ground-breaking. They have a history of ground-breaking designs, I would like to see them re-open that can of worms. A V8, a V6, a V4 a triple, whatever. I am not a dyed in the wool traditionalist that only wants them to keep making what they are making. I just don't want them to become a badge engineered sub-division of Aprilia.

I have been to a few tractor pulls, now that I live in the country (it is required to go, I think). They are a lot of fun, especially the modified's. A "tractor" with three or four blown V8's....Awesome. A "tractor" powered by a radial airplane engine.....Insane. I do like tractor pulls. But, in all honesty, as cool as tractor pulls are the NHRA Nitro guys blew them into the weeds, big time. That was a whole 'nother level.

Perhaps you are referring to magnafluxing. For aluminum you obviously can't use the traditional magnetic version of the process, but from what I understand they have a dye based version that works on aluminum. You do have to remove the flywheel to test it.

While Guzzi might sell a fair number of something like that, I hope that they avoid falling into the retro market too far. I hope they focus on modern, relevant, motorcycles that can stand on their own. They have the V7 line for the retro crowd. If you need more power, just get a V7 and add an 820 8 valve kit from Todd. Don't just wish for it, do it.

I went to my first NHRA pro event this past weekend, the kind with the top fuel dragsters and funny cars. All I can say is WOW. I have seen it on tv but that does not do it justice. It was amazing. I am not really into drag racing, I am into motorsports in general. I have been to local short track car races, flat track motorcycle races, AMA roadracing, NASCAR, MotoGP and even F1. Even with all that previous experience I was still seriously impressed. I have never seen anything else that impressive. The noise, the violence, the speed, it was all quite staggering. As to the noise, it went beyond terms of volume. You actually felt it as much as you heard it. Ear plugs almost seemed like a waste of time. My internal organs were hearing it. You could see the shock wave from the cars. Watching them idling at the start line, staging, it was almost subdued. But the moment the light changed you could see the cars erupt in violence. Then, a moment later as we were 600 - 700 feet away, you heard the violence. Then it built as they came hurtling towards you. As they went by I could feel my whole body tightening up, as if to holds my insides against the shockwave. After experiencing this in person I highly recommend that anyone who is into racing, into motorsports, go watch it in person for themselves if they have the opportunity. That was amazing.

It goes both ways. If the inlet narrows the speed increases and the pressure decreases. If the inlet widens (as the stock ones do) the speed decreases and the pressure can increase (as long as the rate of area increase doesn't go up faster than the flow can fill it). An increase in pressure is good, but not in the pipe leading to the air box. You want that pressure increase in the airbox and not on the way to the airbox. An increase in pressure in the pipe leading to the airbox would likely reduce flow to the airbox. I think the alteration to the airbox intakes that Phil did were mainly to address the very beginning of flow into the airbox. I think it was geared towards getting the air to smoothly enter the tubes, thus maximizing the flow into the airbox. A tube with an abrupt opening can develop turbulence around the opening. That turbulence can make the actual opening flow less air then it should. I think the alterations were trying to improve that first part of the flow. Filling in those odd shaped "resonators" (at least that is what I assume they are) would probably also help, as would anything else you could do to make the area of the intake constant through out the length.

The relays tend to be an issue with these bikes. Not just the relays themselves but also the sockets the relays mount to. Bad connections there can cause the same issues as bad relays, easy enough to check. I have no experience with Panasonic relays, they could be fine. But, there are certain brands of relays which are known to be good and I would try to use those. Also, I would use the same relays for all your relays, the extra pin is simply not used in some slots. That allows you to freely swap relays without being limited by pin counts.

I did something like this for my Daytona. I bought a stock guzzi wiring harness from a similar bike and used that to make a custom wiring harness. Either I am not as good at wiring as I thought or it was harder than I thought. Either way, it was a serious project. But it was worth it for mae as I had made some considerable changes to the bike and the stock harness was not going to work well.

My own opinion on this is.... I don't run the starter motor for more than 5 or 6 seconds. If it doesn't start in that amount of time let it sit for 10 seconds or so and try again. It can't hurt to use the fast idle, even if it is not cold, so you don't need to worry about it hurting anything. If you think it might need it go ahead and use it. If you know the bike is warm and will start without it skip it. All it does is crack the throttle open slightly. It does not add any extra fuel other than what would get added if you crack the throttle open slightly. If you can comfortably touch the heads than the motor is cold and the fast idle will usually help. It is not so much about air temp as motor temp. But, see the last for final say. Listen to the bike. It will tell you what it likes. As each bike is slightly different as far as tuning goes you will find that what works best on one Guzzi may or may not work well on another. Just pay attention to what works.

The titanium rear subframe is the yellow structure that is holding up the rear seat section. You can see it at the bottom front of the seat section. It runs all the way to the back where the oil cooler is mounted.

Some more info on the bike. The forks are Ohlins off a WSBK Kawasaki. The rear shock is Ohlins with a rising rate linkage (the Ducati 750SS used a cantilever set up like that of the V11). The brakes are Brembo iron disks and Performance Machine billet calipers ( with a Lockheed adjustable master. The front wheel in the picture is not the original front wheel, I need to mount that back on there. The correct front wheel is a carbon fiber wheel. The rear subframe is a custom titanium piece. It uses a radial steering damper. It has a quick shifter (from back in the mid '90's when few did). The exhaust (other than that muffler) is hand made out of stainless by a guy who made exhaust systems for NASCAR.

Well, first off; Yes, I was lucky enough to be the rider. I did not own the bikes (I do now, through attrition), they were owned by a friend. And I did not have to do all the mechanical work, another dear friend took care of that. I had the fun job on the team. The stock chassis bike is easily 10 seconds a lap faster than a stock Ducati 750SS at our local track Summit Point. The Harris framed bike was about 3 seconds a lap faster still. Clearly the differences go down as you get further and further moddified. Each additional bit of speed gets harder and harder to achieve. Part of the reason the difference between a stock bike and the race bikes is the stock bike we started with was rather under developed from Ducati. With a modern sport bike the differences are likely half what we had. The motor makes close to double what the stock motor weighed, somewhere in the 80's at the rear wheel. The bike weighs about 325 lbs. That is about 100 lbs less than stock.

Yes, your partially sprung theory makes total sense to me. Even when racers are fully hanging off, their body weight is mostly feed into the bike through the pegs allowing their upper body to float just above the seat. This allows for the bike to move around underneath you. It also lowers the center of gravity and it allows you to shift weight between the inside and outside foot pegs to maintain control and balance.

Well, you can't borrow it. She and her sister are pretty much art on display nowadays, sitting in my living room. This is the Harris Ducati. She has sister I will try to post as well. Each one has an AHRMA BOTT title to her name, as well as success in other series and races. They were at the top of the twins class back in the early to mid '90's. We built the Harris bike in '94 while racing the stock framed bike. The stock framed bike, Bridgette, won the AHRMA BOTT F2 (is that enough letters?) title in '94. The Harris framed bike, Guinevere, won the AHRMA BOTT F2 title in '95.

A couple of things stand out. First, putting a knee down means little unless you are pushing the edge and even then it is often over used. Second, you really aren't that far from doing it but you would need to stick your knee out (which involves being flexible in that respect) and lean the bike over a little farther. Third, your riding position reminds me of Kevin Schwantz back in the day. He would shift his lower half pretty far off the bike to achieve higher corner speeds but keep his upper body more centered on the bike which seemed to aid him in controlling things when it started to go wrong. I think it came from his background in trials. Body positioning tends to change with the times. The current trend is to get your entire body as far off the inside as possible and newer bikes work well with that style in so many ways. But when the V11 was made that was not the trend, and as a Guzzi it was even a little behind the current trend of the day. While I am sure you could ride a V11 much like you can any other modern sportbike I think your best results would be to ride it the way it was meant to be ridden. A good example of this is my two Ducati racebikes. One is a '90's Ducati 750 with a stock frame. The other is from the same era but it is a full custom built bike with an aluminum Harris chassis. The stock chassis bike rides like so many other Ducatis of the day, don't try to brake and turn at the same time. You have to be smooth with it, do all your braking in a straight line, arc the bike into the corner trying to maintain momentum, and power out. It likes a style more like Hailwood and less like Marquez. It rewards smoothness and momentum. If you ride it the way it wants to be ridden it is fast. The Harris bike is totally different. You can brake and turn at the same time, it can change lines at the drop of a hat, and it will do whatever you tell it to the moment you tell it to. It goes as fast as you tell it to, but it does not try to make you ride it any certain way. The V11 is more like the old '90's Ducati.

Well, I do agree with much of what you said. But perhaps I can use your own words to help you see my point. I see you used the term "adequate throughput" several times in your explanation. And, as I understand your explanation, you could have used the term "adequate flow" in its place. Perhaps you realized that, perhaps you didn't. Either way, here is what you said with little more than replacing the one term with the other. //The wedge is a rolling wave-form that is created at the point of greatest pressure within the bearing. The smaller the clearance the greater the strength of the wedge. The problem is that friction between the molecules being forced together creates heat, the only way to prevent the heat building up to levels where the oil will break down is to have adequate flow and it is for that reason that for plain bearings volume per-se is important. Plain bearings are always a compromise and the oil is there to provide three functions, to cool, to lubricate and to clean. Without adequate flow the oil won't be able to remove enough heat and the oil will break down allowing boundary lubrication. Without adequate pressure pressure.// Now, clearly oil pressure is needed in an internal combustion engine. But oil pressure is not what creates the hydrodynamic wedge. Nor is it required to create a hydrodynamic wedge. You can create that simply with oil and spinning. I know there is a lot of technical aspects in there, including a bunch of physics and what not. But what is not required to create it is oil pressure itself. The pressures involved in the hydrodynamic wedge far exceed the kinds of pressures the oil pump can create. You could just run the plain bearing in a bath of oil and it would likely work. Oil pressure means the pump is trying to pump more oil at a faster rate than the system wants to flow, i.e., the oil pump is trying to flow more oil than the system wants to flow. Now, a reduction in oil pressure can mean something is wrong. It can mean the bearing tolerances are opening up. It can mean the oil has thinned out. It can mean there is a leak in the pressure side of the system. We have pretty much covered all that already. He is another way to look at the relationship between pressure and flow. If you take an oil pump that is flowing its rated capacity and increase the pressure in the system by tightening up the clearances in the bearings the actual amount of oil the pump will be flowing will go down, unless the pump was not already at its rated capacity in the first place. All else being equal, for pressure to go up flow goes down and vice versa. More flow can be a good thing, as you kinda mentioned it keeps temps lower and reduces stress on the oil. It also makes sure there is plenty of oil to do its job. The issue in this case could be the clearances are opening up. It could also be a leak in the pressure side of the system. And it could even be a worn oil pump or a blockage on the suction side of the system. As the second and third sets of issues don't require full dis-assembly to check I think those would be good options to explore. But as the motor does not seem to have any horrid noises or running issues that would usually be from worn out bearings I think I would wait on the full dis-assembly myself. But since you could likely do it in your sleep I would not be surprised if your mentality was different on that. Sorry if all I did was piss you off.

I also like to use anti-seize on the pipe joints, so they can slide in and out as required. It also makes it easier to take apart later.

Pressure is simply when there is more gozinto then there is gozouta. Flow is how much oil is flowing. Pressure is how much resistance to that oil flowing. The link you posted had a fairly interesting discussion on that. Scuds thought to check those o-rings is a good one. Anything that allows flow to bled off before the bearings means less flow and thus less pressure to the bearings. An oil filter coming loose, those o-rings leaking, or an open pressure relief valve (there is usually one of those in the oil filter and one in the block), can all allow flow to by-pass the bearings meaning there is less resistance to flow. The viscosity of the oil determines its resistance to flow, a thicker oil has more resistance to flow. As your oil breaks down it can get thinner or thicker, changing its resistance to flow. If your oil gets diluted by fuel (I hear this is rampant among people who use a PowerCommander) it will get thinner and thus have less resistance to flow. The clearances in the bearings determine their resistance to flow, too much clearance means they have too little resistance and thus they do not allow any pressure to build up. And, as said earlier in this thread, if your motor is excessively worn you will have less oil pressure. But if it is not making any nasty noises and runs fine I would personally not worry too much down that road.

Absolutely 100% incorrect. The exact opposite is true. Pressure is the most vital factor in the oil being able to form a wedge. Volume is needed for cooling but pressure is the vital ingredient. If the 25PSI figure quoted by the OP is accurate then one or other of the major bearings is seriously compromised. The reasons for this are well known. Pete Well, then plain bearings can't work in a Guzzi I guess. They certainly don't have enough oil pressure to over come the forces applied to the bearings. It is the rotation that forms the hydrodynamic wedge allowing a plain bearing to work in a motor. Assuming hydrodynamic is not just a fancy word but also how plain bearings can work with low oil pressure.

The wife's V11 has the K&N / BMC filter with the stock lid but the snorkels removed. There is someone on here who used heat to mold / alter the stock snorkels so they were larger in the opening and better shaped for flow. I always thought that was a good idea, but I have yet to play with it. The open top airbox is another common mod, the noise does increase with that one. Something to watch for if you go that route is the underside of the fuel tank has some heat insulation attached (I use that term loosely). If that heat shield comes away from the underside of the tank it can find itself laying across your open airbox / filter combo, resulting in airflow issues. Just make sure the heat shield is firmly attached to the underside of the fuel tank. Getting it dyno tuned does not really mean it will work out. It really comes down to putting in the effort to find a good compromise to make the pods work. Or stumbling across a good compromise if you are lucky. Even with dyno tuning it likely won't be better than stock over all, it might make more power in some rpm ranges but usually that is a trade off and in other rpm ranges it makes less power. For my older Guzzi with the pods, a '93 Daytona, I have a fairly complicated pod set up with velocity stacks (without them the pod set up is at a disadvantage) and pods mounted to / over the velocity stacks. Then there are synthetic covers for the pods that help with water resistance.

With a lot of work (or luck) you can get pods to work almost as well as the stock airbox. And they do look sexy. But, like doc said, if you are more about riding the bike than looking at it the stock airbox is hard to beat. I have pods on an older Guzzi, it was like that when I bought it and on that one the stock airbox is perhaps not as well designed. But on most motors the airbox provides a large pocket of still air for the motor to inhale and that is almost always a good thing. Stick your head out the window while driving your car down the road and you will see it gets harder to breathe in. The larger that pocket of still air the better. Pods are typically limited in the size of that pocket of air they provide. If you do go with pods get the largest ones you can fit, but that kinda defeats one of the main reasons to run pods; the open look.

Be careful, I have heard that someone other than Pete was making and selling them. It was a very un-cool thing as I recall. I think it was someone who should have known better than to steal a fellow Guzzi guy's intellectual property. If you want one I would be sure that it is an authentic RoperSloper plate. Simply because I don't support people / companies that behave badly.