Lucky Phil

Rebuild is pretty straight forward and cheap to do. Phil

Don't know if this story fits this thread but back in the early 70's when I was a kid my parents had a cobbled together stereo system. Decent turntable and speakers but the amp was a home made valve unit made by my father who was an electrician by trade. I was very familiar with it's sound because it got played quite a bit. Anyway my fathers best friend was a Flight engineer for Qantas and travelled overseas a lot so on one of his trips he bought the old man a brand new latest transistorised Sony amp. I was there for the exciting hook up and first play. Result? Disappointment from me I can remember. Gone was the soft mellow full sound replaced by some sort of tinny scratchy sound. Not sure how to explain it better than that but I've never forgotten it. Phil

Good luck with that. In years to come the evening news won't be about busting some suburban meth lab but busting me in some suburban petrol lab. Phil

How are the conditions of the roads out your way at the moment? Around here they are totally appalling. So bad I'm reluctant to take the Supra out driving and I'm dodging everywhere avoiding potholes that will swallow a basketball in the other cars with higher profile tyres. Plenty of money being spent on useless endeavours like mowing grass 2 inches high on the sides of the roads but zero interest it seems on fixing the suspension killing roads after the wettest coldest winter here in years. Phil

A couple of points. E85 is not readily available in Australia. I've never seen it at any petrol station and I live in almost the largest city in the country by population. Google tells me it's available at selected United outlets but I never use that outlet as they traditionally sell shite fuel so maybe they do but they are a small player outlet wise. The other issue with E85 conversion is less MPG and the plastic fuel tanks on a V11 swell bad enough on E10 let alone E85. Also unless the engine is optimised for E85 then there's little to no performance benefit and if you know me then you know how concerned I am with the "climate emergency" and domestic motor vehicle pollution. The gains from E85 in performance terms are with the turbo engines. Running E85 has significant power gains due to being able to turn the boost up safely with a "tune". Unless you pull the engine down and bump the comp to utilise the added nock resistance then there's not much to gain on a v11 engine. A little better cooling maybe but as I said worse fuel economy which isn't particularly attractive for most. Like Guzzler I go out of my way to avoid ethanol fuels. If you are environmentally concerned about the future of ICE engines the way forward is synthetic fuel. Carbon neutral and zero mechanical or tuning requirements. 4 times the cost at present but this will come down as mass production increases. Porsche has a facility producing it now in Chile and MotoGP will run it exclusively in a year or two. Phil

The only issue I ever had riding on the right was when doing u turns. Always defaulted to a right U turn which was interesting. I've told the wife to act instantly and yell at me if I revert to left driving on our Italian trip. I had no issues driving in the States but that was 10 years ago now. Phil

Yes all correct. The perennial issue these days is adapting your chassis to the latest tyres. Back in the pre spec tyre days the tyre manufacturers would build you a tyre to suit your chassis which was faster cheaper and easier for the bike manufacturers. They would even make them overnight and ship them to the race for certain riders at close by tracks. The other KTM issue is WP suspension. Not saying it's better or worse than Ohlins but when every other single bike is running Ohlins until you are as well you never know just how much advantage or disadvantage the WP suspension is giving you. In times when you are literally chasing 10th's of a second you can't afford any disadvantage if there is one. The CF chassis in the current KTM is a red herring/blind alley anyway. Tubular trellis is not a design that lends itself to CF material. Think of bicycles 30 years ago that started using tubular CF construction, basically a round carbon tube traditional construction bike and look at the shape they use now in CF. It took them many years to understand that the carbon material required a totally different profile and shape to offer any advantage. It's like building a tube trellis frame in aluminium. It can be done but it's the wrong design/cross sectional shape for the material characteristics. Ducati made a big mistake back when Rossi was riding for them ditching the CF chassis to try and appease Rossi's lack of ability to adapt to the CF chassis. They had a great medium to long term engineering plan to move chassis design forward but caved under the Rossi can't adapt and "must win now" pressure and leverage he had with Ducati via the sponsors. He realised what a brilliant rider Stoner was after riding that Ducati. Stoner liked the CF chassis. He said the issue with the trellis chassis was no two ever felt the same due to the many and varied pieces that go into it and the many welded joints. The CF chassies were all the same feel no matter what apparently. Until that is you decided to lay the carbon slightly differently to change the flex characteristic. That was the forward plan, a fast, cheap, efficient and easy way to tailor a chassis characteristics to changing tyre and rider requirements. Scuppered by an ego at the end of the day.

Yep you're correct on all counts. CBF to move the bonnet release for the opposite drive countries. I'm always hitting the wipers to make turns in the Supra and just when I get used to it I start doing the same thing in the other two cars when I get back in them. I wonder aloud if there is any sort of advantage driving on the left or the right side of the road. Phil

There's 2 of the latest Corvettes in our area and we saw one driving around a few months ago and my wife asked me why we didn't buy one of those instead of the Supra. The black one looks good but the lime green one doesn't. Unusual car whos look changes dramatically depending on the colour which probably means it's fundamentally not that nice aesthetically. Phil

Yea I also like and looked at a Jag F series. Great looking car but it's a Jag, and well, it's a Jag. When I was researching a new DD 18 months ago I saw stats for the Range Rover Evoke with regards to reliability and the reviewer mentioned that they were considered to be quite problematic in that regard but people were still buying them Phil

Got news for you Mick my previous DD the Ford Kuga ( Escape to the US) the hood release was also on the pax side and so was the Focus RS. The Supra has the hood release on the drivers side but with the BMW specific double pull release. So you don't release the hood and then feel under it for the secondary safety latch to operate you pull the hood release and it pops up then you pull it again to release the secondary latch. Quirky. The Supra being a BMW mechanically has the indicator stork on the left side of the column which in an auto is no problem but a bit of a pain in a manual because your left hand is usually busy shifting gears to operate the indicators. So you need to hit the indicators very early. The Astons are a beautiful car and I considered buying a SH one but at the end of the day too much hassle on quite a few levels. An old Guzzi's enough hassle

I watched the race and don't remember seeing anything I thought was questionable with regards to bike performance between the Ducati boys. Guzzimoto is correct in that speed on the straight is a combination of many things including the drive you get onto it at some tracks like Phillip Island and Portimao for example. Add to that fuel saving strategies and aero these days and it's even more complex. I always laughed back in the 500 days about the "big advantage" the Hondas had in top speed over the Yamahas which was true but the problem was they made it all at the end of the straight which was a problem. The Yamaha would accelerate out of the corner onto the straight and pull a gap on a Honda only to get passed again with ease esp with the draft. Problem was this all happened just before the braking point so now the Honda guys were carrying more speed and needed to pull it up at which point the Yamaha guys would be up the inside with less speed to wash off. Top speed is as much about where you attain it as the actual number. In WSB this year the Yamahas are the slowest bikes and have a big issue with that as the last race demonstrated with a very long straight. I was hoping Remy would be able to negate that as he's shown in the past he's very very good at getting drive onto the straight at Portimao but he didn't have an advantage on the R1 this time. Fuel consumption dictates power these days and if one rider goes to a fuel saving/tyre conservation map a lap before the other rider then you'll probably see a disparity on the straight. Didn't Pecco run out of fuel on the warm down lap? or was that in warm-up/qualifying?

Looking at the assembly diagram they do what I typically do with rod end bearing and use an appropriately sized oring to stop the component flapping about in use. The oring of course deflects when needed but helps prevent unwanted movement. I use an oring on my aftermarket reaction rod so the spherical bearing isn't wearing itself out unduely.Try assembling the part in question without the orings and see the result and if there's the bolt tilting. The orings will probably partially mask or make more difficult to see what we are looking for. I've seen images of the Bitubo damper and it also looks nice but I think all of the "name" dampers including the Ohlins seem way overpriced for what they really are. Even the dampers alone are approaching the cost of a decent rear shock. EDIT....I came across this image I had saved on my computer when doing my own Ohlins damper conversion of the Standard V11 Sport Ohlins damper instillation and body bracket. Note how the Ohlins body bracket is a simple lug with a threaded hole and no spherical bearing. I couldn't buy one of these and the clamping bracket was too complex a shape for me to machine and it look decent so I bought the Ducabike one with the spherical bearing and then machined a triple clamp lug I could do half decently instead. Phil

Ok spherical bearing. When you bolt it up check to see if there is any rocking motion of the bearings mounted together that causes a small "dead zone" each side of centre. In other words does the clamp bolt tilt from side to side as you initiate steering movement from the centred position and delay slightly the stroke of the damper. Phil

Dimensions of the replacement? If you've ridden without one for 1500 miles then I guess you've answered your own question, lol.

That would be great. I'm only interested because I buy a lot of aftermarket stuff for the bikes and cars and find especially with the Guzzi because it's pretty old now a lot of aftermarket stuff isn't really suitable as in the wrong design to start with. Companies look to utilise something they already make for older machines to broaden their market and don't bother too much about the details. The Andreani cartridges were an example of this ( and a $200 loss to me) and so were the PVM wheels I bought for the bike. Can you believe their are literally hundreds of outlets on the internet still listing the Andreani carts as fitting all V11 Sports 1999-2006 even though the non fitting issue for the early bikes has been known about for 5 years! The wheels cost over $4000 and when I got them I had to disassemble them and re machine the bearing bushes because the front wheel brake callipers wouldn't fit. The rear disk carrier itself had over .2mm runout which required me re machining that as well. Probably why the German company that retailed the wheels no longer sells them. Because the world is full of reseller now with no idea and also people that CAD design stuff in their spare room and send the file to China for mass production trial fit it on their own car/bike, do no testing and then start selling on their website. I've also recently had issues with some car stuff I've bought and it's the same. 99% of people don't even realise the stuff they are buying is sub standard. Because it looks nice and it's "billet" then it must be good right? Phil

Ha, not on my bike. I never use the back brake. Phil

Because to me it looks like a spherical bearing was used in the damper clamp and I therefore asked the question and the response was "yes" and the the discussion went from there. Phil

They are very common here in the building industry and available just about everywhere. The fact that they don't use them commonly or at all in engineering that I know of probably tells you something. Personally I have no issues with Torx screws. Better than Allen heads for stripping out. Problem is generally with shallow head fasteners but you get that with Allen head as well in button head and countersunk screws that have a reduced slot depth. On a Guzzi lots of fasteners were installed with Loctite because Guzzi don't care about future maintenance requirements so you need to use lots of heat on those fasteners and then throw them away. I've never used loctite on any brake part on anything in my life. The classic is Loctite on the 4mm throttle body screws! Madness. Phil

Sounds good. Have a look the the seals on the needle bearing outer as well. Phil

Scotchbrite and WD-40 Phil

My Ohlins and doccs shindy have 2 spherical bearings. One on the shaft and one on the male rod end bolted to the lower triple clamp. The question was if the Hyperpro has an additional spherical bearing fitted in the damper BODY clamp that attaches to the lower triple clamp rod end fitting the same as my Ohlins body clamp. Therefore you have a spherical bearing in the body fitting another one on the triple clamp fitting and another on the rod end 3 in all. If the Hyperpro damper body clamp fitting does have a spherical bearing fitted then you can't use the std lower triple clamp spherical bearing set up and need to either have a solid triple clamp fitting such as the one I made up OR replace the damper body spherical mount with a solid bush. Phil

Use Titanium and you never need to concern yourself with the surface finish ever again. If the bike was dumped in a salt water lake for 100 years all that would be left would be pristine titanium fasteners. Phil

Yea thats why for expensive items you need to contact them and ask if they actually have it in stock before you pay. At the very least they then need to contact their supplier and check availability. It's no fun paying up front then finding out they didn't know the part is no longer available. The refund takes days and you lose out on exchange rates and charges. If they don't bother responding it generally means they don't have the part.