pete roper

As I said. NGK have ceased production. The end! No more! Any at any shop will be NOS. I don’t know about Champion.

I have done a useful video on throttlebodies I recommend you watch. it covers some important stuff about the 50mm TB’s and the W5AM system.

The problem with a lot of gear sets that have been, and in some cases still are, offered for the venerable 2V motor is that they are utter shite. Shite material, shite production, shite tooth form or a combination of any or all of the above. Twenty years ago I ended up being abused and sometimes physically threatened by people who swore by the wretched things . I was told all sorts of guff, the funniest being that I had ‘Installed them wrong’! It’s three wheels on sticks! How hard can it be??? There were various commonly available types. Full alloy sets, sometimes made of Ergal, which is a particularly tough form of aluminium alloy, but often just seemingly any old cheesy junk. Then there were alloy/steel composite sets with a steel crank gear and aluminium oil pump and cam gears and finally a set with a nylon crank gear and aluminium pump and cam gears. Now ‘Back in the day’ I too was a dyed in the wool ‘Gears are best’ person and indeed, if made correctly from the correct materials, they really are. I spent several years exploring the different options but unlike many of the ‘True Believers’ I didn’t just fling them in and forget about them. I’d put them in and then regularly reopen and examine them for wear and damage. What I found was very disturbing. They ALL started failing almost immediately! Even when I tried modifying the timing chest so that the pump gear ran in an oil bath to assist in lubrication of the teeth they all failed. I actually have a ‘Rogues Gallery’ of a few failed sets of different types in my Flickr gallery, these include some pics taken by Joe Caruso of similarly buggered sets he’s removed. These include some of the Ergal sets made by Agostinis that some of the more wild-eyed swear by! I have terrible trouble getting pics to post on V11 LeMans.com but I can probably send a link to the gallery if anyone is interested? The end result is I refused to install them. They were and are, engine wreckers. No ifs or buts! This doesn’t mean I don’t think gears are ‘The Best’ solution. Simply that these comparatively cheap commercial sets aren’t it! FWIW back in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s you used to be able to buy helically cut steel gears with quite a fine tooth pitch. I shelled out for a set of these way back when and they were brilliant. I clocked up an astonishing distance with them in my ‘Primary’ bike and used them in my short stroke hot-rod. While the helical cut meant they would sap a bit of power it also gave you the advantage you could shim the cam gear to finesse the cam timing to a ridiculous degree and with the cams I was playing with every bit helped! I ended up giving them to a bloke called Steve Harney, (I think?) who was racing at the same time as Rob Johnson and I were in the early 2000’s. I’ve no idea where they are now! These weren’t common, have long been unavailable but if you want gears Joe’s are certainly the only ones I’d be bothered with. For most everyday riders though keeping the chain and running a Valtech blade type tensioner is perfectly adequate. A new chain and tensioner will probably be required every 140-150,000 Km in normal use. If you throw a new set at your engine at 100,000 your sprockets will probably last until the sun shrinks to become a white dwarf so longevity isn’t really an issue! The cost is also paltry compared to Joe’s gears. So really, it’s down to choice really, and the depth of your pockets and how obsessive you are. As for the noise? I love the noise!

If I were going to be building another 2V engine I’d be all over these like a rash. For *ordinary* people who are just riding their bikes gears are really a bit of overkill, but like the fact that twin throttle bodies appeal to my sense of ‘engineering purity’ rather than a single one I’d have to say I’d like gears. I am though, a complete twat!

One thing I often get is some wild eyed idiot telling me that his shitty, poorly maintained, Cali 1100 can out handle my CARC bikes. Even better I’ve had people saying their early LeMans is faster! I’ve even had these people challenge me to a ‘Race’ to prove their point! What sort of lunatic is going to respond to a challenge like that FFS? I’m knocking on the door of seventy! These toothless imbeciles are usually older than me! And they expect me to engage in a ‘Race’ with them? On a public road? With all of the associated imbeciles and road furniture mixed in? Nah, they’re right of course. I’m just too pusillanimous to engage their visceral manliness and their wheezing bags of shit are just too good for my crappy ‘Modern’ motorbike with its plastic tank that has been strangled by government legislation and overreach! Give me f*cking strength……..

Caps. http://kandstech.com/productreleases/sprc.pdf Note. This will be useful for V11 owners too as you will probably need new caps after you bin it. From memory the NGK’s were SB05’s caps.

They are copper core wires and yes, resistor caps. The resistor can be damaged by careless prying but in this case I’m pretty certain the problem is down to the rubber of the cap being torn. The fact it was raining when the problem arose is one indicator. Thing is when damaged the caps quite often don’t start arcing immediately. It seems to usually take about five to thirty Km for the problem to appear. Just far enough for it to be bloody inconvenient! Once the arcing happens though it’ll form a carbon track through the crack in the rubber and it’s all over red rover! Taking the plugs out and putting them in the caps and testing them against the heads is fine. You’ll still get a spark at the plug because the crack in the cap is away from the head and the spark isn’t being stressed. Electricity takes the path of least resistance and outside of the engine jumping the plug gap is easy. Once the plug is in the head the conditions, heat, compression etc. are far more hostile and so the spark looks for an easier route to earth. A nice damp crack in the boot of the plug cap is perfect! Wham-Bam-Thankyou-Mam and it’s all over bar the shouting. It’s really important NOT to ride in this condition as the uncombusted fuel from the dead cylinder gets pumped through into the exhaust where it can combust in the catalytic converter. That as you can guess is when the fun really starts!

Worth a try but I don’t think it will be long enough.

Well, that is likely your problem. The caps are very soft and tear easily. Levering them off from the top as shown almost invariably damages them. It may not be obvious at first glance but if you remove the lead covers and spin the bike over in a dark garage you will likely hear, and probably see, the spark *Snapping* to earth between the right angle of the cap and the rocker cover. The factory supplied, at enormous cost, a sort of grabby tool that you could slide down the cap to grip it and pull it up. I’ve never seen one! Ain’t nobody gunna pay for that nonsense! The way to remove the caps without damage is to get a long, thin, flat bladed screwdriver and poke it into the cooling tunnel in the head just above the exhaust manifold. Prod around with it and you’ll feel the soft rubber of the cap. You can then hook the end of the blade under the bottom of the cap and lever the cap up, off the electrode. Once the cap’s clip is clear of the electrode tip then and only then do you grab the cap at the top and wriggle it out with a gentle twisting motion. When reinstalling give a light smear of rubber grease around the sealing ‘rings’ on the cap to make it easier to slip out next time. Now the common replacement for the rather delicate original caps used to be NGK SB05-E or F caps, the suffix letter denoting the fitment for the tip shape of the plug centre electrode. Thing is NGK have ceased production of plug caps due to lack of demand, (Everything having moved to plug top coils.) but nature abhors a vacuum and there is another mob whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head who have stepped into the breach. I think though I put a link to their site up on Griso Ghetto, (Which is probably your best source for 8V info and yes, we like ALL CARC bikes so you won’t be ostracised!). The NGK caps don’t have the right angle tops and you have to bend the HT lead over to fit it under the lead cover which looks a bit ugly but it works. If you’re lucky you may find a set of NOS NGK caps on fleabay or the like. Next up in your steep learning curve will be understanding how the W5AM ECU controls the engine and why you should never move the ‘Sacred’ throttle stop screw while tuning it!

Who has been servicing it? How were the plug caps removed?

Sorry, I missed this. I have a couple of ideas. I’ll cover them in a bit when I’m not on my phone.

From a purely mechanical and electronic perspective the 15M ECU doesn’t have the potential to support the ABS functions required. The W5AM does and I have, as I’ve aged, seriously considered fitting a pump and sub-harness to the loom on the Griso so I could do it. It’s been done in Europe I know. Thing is it would be an enormous hassle and my ‘Touring’ bike already has ABS so, despite the fact I’d like to have it I’m essentially too lazy, and not risk averse enough, to be bothered with the Mighty Griso.

Sorry, that sort of sentimental mumbo-jumbo makes me want to puke! And ‘Rush’? Give me strength! Even when they were *Big* they were more ‘Hobble with a Zimmer Frame’! A mob of talentless mouth breathers with the sophistication of a pit toilet! I fart in their general direction!

Depended who they were. Some of the wisest people I knew when I was a teenager were retired tradesmen who encouraged my interest in things mechanical. Snooty, mealy mouthed busybodies always trying to get into other people’s lives and business, (And there were a lot of them around in the seventies!)? Not so much.

Yup, and, providing the world doesn’t end, IC vehicles will end up being an ‘Enthusiast’ hobby, a bit like steam trains are. Oh, they will, at least for the foreseeable future, remain a lot more popular than steam trains simply because unlike steam locomotives IC vehicles were, and are, ubiquitous and everybody in the western ‘Developed’ world will have memories inextricably woven in to the fabric of their lives that will involve them. Be it memories of family holidays as a kid or that thrill of discovery when you took your first trip *Away* independently on your first motorbike or car? Almost everyone will have those and ‘We’ and the generations up to the present will wish to preserve those memories and the items associated with them. I don’t think IC will need to be legislated out of existence. I think it will just fade into the background. What will replace it? Who knows? Whatever it is will still have the potential to be just as exciting, if society wishes it to be so. As it is more and more people nowadays, and not just young people, seem to be more interested in consumerism and living out a ‘Fantasy’ life vicariously through the lives of others on a small, glowing, screen. Is that wrong? Or bad? It’s not really my place to say. I’m an old man at the end of my (Enormously lucky!) life. The world I am bequeathing to my children is pretty f*cked up! If I were young I wouldn’t listen to a godammed word people like me say!