pete roper

I use good oil from a reputable company. My engines, or gearboxes, or bevelboxes, rarely go ‘Udders Skywards’. If they do it is very unlikely to be the fault of the oil. Case in point. My recently acquired Mana GT has a 10/40 specified. As I expected it wasn’t filled correctly because, being a semi dry sump engine people can’t get their heads around the fact you have to fill it more than once. Consequently it was almost a litre down. Not a big deal, it has plenty, but I refilled it with what I had lying around which is the 0/20 used in my Suzuki Jimny. It hasn’t blown up yet……

I have a whole ‘Chamber of Horrors’ file of pics of Alloy timing gears and alloy/steel composite sets. None of them are, or were, ever worth a pinch of shit! Criticising them has led to threats of violence being made against me by mentally unstable and drug-fu*ked individuals so I tend not to say anything about them nowadays beyond just advising strongly against their use. I’ve spoken with Joe about these gear sets though and we’r in complete agreement. You wouldn’t use them in a lawnmower! Much less a motorbike!

Why do you think that swapping to pod filters will provide any benefit? I’d advise against it personally.

If the brakes haven’t been bled for an age the main piston seal in the master cylinder may be collapsed and not sealing properly.

I’ve now retired but my offsider is now running the business and we were/are capable in working on Guzzis built this century. We’re just up the road from you.

@#!#$# it off immediately. Tune the bike properly and if needs be remap it but those things, sold under a variety of names, are poison as you have found out.

I’d say that while yes, it is a ‘Western World’ phenomenon it is generally more of an anglophone western phenomenon, certainly my experiences in non-English speaking cultures in the last couple of decades have generally been more favourable. There is also the simple matter of history. History and sums! For the last half millenium at least western culture has been, both geographically and politically dominant. The historical narrative, at least the one most people absorb, is western and Eurocentric. Now other countries and cultures are becoming wealthier a proportion of their citizens will want to travel and when you are looking at countries like China and India with populations of over a billion a piece it doesn’t take many as a percentage to mean that their chosen destinations will become overwhelmed. Throw in ‘Our’ own boomers who have retired and want to see a bit of the world, often in a cocooned and ‘Safe’, ie, familiar environment that never takes them out of their comfort zone and it all turns into a rapidly evolving train wreck! I don’t think that the majority of these people are bad or unpleasant. Just boorish impatient and demanding. The way Jude and I tackle it is probably a bit unusual in that we try to avoid big ticket ‘Name’ destinations like the plague and if we do want to go somewhere where you know it’s always going to be insanely busy we go, as we do in most places, in the depths of winter as this tends to thin the tourists out a bit. On top of this we like to go to, and actively prefer, to stay in poorer, less developed and smaller towns and villages. Apart from the fact locals in bars and restaurants are always fascinated by WHY these strange, little old white haired pensioner people have come all the way from Australia to their little turdpoke village in Abruzzo or wherever! Then they want to know if you are on first name terms with their cousin in Griffith in the Riverina in NSW or their son Claudio who is a waiter in Adelaide etc etc ! In the UK we only drop down below the imaginary line we’ve drawn between the Bristol Channel and the Wash to visit relatives as anywhere below that line is an overpriced zoo with far, far too many people, most of whom think they are terribly special and are crying out for a good ‘Throat Punch’! Above the line things are infinitely better. There are still pockets of asshattery and some of the cities are really grim after 45 years of almost uninterrupted Tory destruction but the population density is way lower, it’s cheaper and the locals, (Outside the grim cities.) are friendly and helpful. It is also the cradle of the Industrial Revolution with history and museums to die for. The countryside, even in mid winter when it can be pretty bleak, is beautiful and once you get into Northumbria and Northumberland and thence on to Scotland the geography and landscapes are simply breathtaking. There is plenty of interesting Roman history to tickle my fancy in the borderlands areas and once into the highlands the austere magnificence is hard to beat although the lack of trees in the far north can cause issues! In January on one trip we were travelling around the A9 across the top of Scotland and had picked up some picnic vittles in Wick. After nearly getting stuck when it stated snowing the weather cleared and we continued but Jude got a bee in her bonnet about finding a picnic table and eating out of the car. Somewhere just west of Thurso she spotted a side road with a sign depicting a picnic spot so we hung a right and went down to the small rest area on the coast. It had a beautiful little beach, (Surprisingly devoid of naked Germans because as you know wherever you go in the world if you find a nice beach it will have some ageing banker from Düsseldorf and his hausfrau lying around with their kit off! Even in Scotland in January!) The absence of trees though belied the fact that it was in fact blowing about a force five gale! As we gathered up our meal of some cold cuts and proper English Cheddar the sun broke through the clouds and shafts of sunlight speared down onto the snow covered Orkney islands to the north, it was like the dawn of the world and stunning to behold! When we got out of the car though the gale was all too apparent but my darling helpmeet insisted we go and sit at the table, which we duly did and I set about hacking up the Baguette I’d bought in Wick. Jude unwrapped the 1/2 Kg of delicious cloth wrapped cheddar and sat it down on the table just as a particularly strong gust of wind hit, picked it up and sent it whistling off in the direction of Stromness never to be seen again! One assumes some lucky guillemot or puffin probably dined well that day! Anyway, after that even Jude thought discretion was the better part of valour and we retreated back to the car! And continued our trip! Sure, in the summer it would have been warmer, the wind would probably of been gentler and we might of got to eat some cheese! But at the same time the A9 across the top of Scotland is in some places only a single lane road with passing pull-offs. In summer it would be gridlocked with morons towing caravans and other assorted mouth breathers! We were probably lucky to see two cars an hour! Anyway! Enough. My main message is pick the ‘Wrong’ time to travel and you’ll find it’s likely to be the ‘Right’ time!

Actually he was misquoting me I think. My original description was ‘two cheesegraters fornicating in an iron tank’ but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Met up with Mark today and asked him about the map/file sizes of the respective ECU’s. The 7SM which was a pretty complex device is apparently about 720Kb. The MP11? How does roughly 3.5 Mb sound!!? That’s a LOT of information!

On that subject of ‘Factory Mapping’ even on *Older* machines it was quite possible for factories to build decent maps if they put their mind to it. My Manas, which use the same W5AM as the CARC series Guzzis have always fuelled up impeccably. There were two or three ‘Map updates’ issued during the manufacturing life of the bike and I’m not even sure if the updates had anything to do with the fuelling as none of them seemed to make a lick of difference to fuelling or fuel economy and they always fuelled up perfectly. Why the early maps for the 8V CARC bikes were such a clusterf*ck is beyond me? It shouldn’t of been that difficult.

I don’t even know if there is a dedicated Cali 1400 forum or club so I can’t advertise there so here will have to do. If any Oz. Members know of anyone with a Cali 14 please point them my way. When we built Beetle’s 1400 single spark Griso motor I bought a Cali 14 wreck to use as the starting point. I still have a grab-bag of parts left for it none of which am I ever likely to use and can’t be bothered to sell and list individually but they include a petrol tank, (With fuel pump.) side covers, swingarm, headlight, various other lights including at least one of the LED tail lights, a rear wheel with disc and tone-wheel, footboards, various parts of the exhaust system and who knows what other old munt. It’s just clogging up my garage which is already stuffed with Grisos and Aprilia Manas and I want it gone. Come and take it all away and leave me a case of Bent Spoke Crankshaft or it goes to the tip!

Yet another advantage to the older ECU’s, you can do it all yourself with a couple of cables and some freeware. Unless they actually download the map and analyse it how are the EPA going to know?

Nope. Thing is before reading that puff piece on ABC Local I’d never heard of that particular myth. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-29/captains-flat-hotel-reopens-sharanne-witt-southern-nsw/104018176 Back when the mine was open things could get pretty wild at The Flat. Floating Schooners would be the least of the problems I’d think!

It’s 1.15PM and 4*C right now, and drizzling. Yesterday was sunny and 12*C at this time and I got a nice shake-down run in to Captains Flat on my new Mana GT. It won’t be getting a gallop today! Rides just like I remember my one in the US did with all its luggage on. Just fine. It really is a superlative little lightweight tourer.

Another thing that makes it much more difficult to safely work out any modifications to the mapping of the MP11 compared to earlier devices is quite simply down to the size of the maps/data it contains. I was chatting briefly with Mark the other day and can’t remember the exact figures, I’ll ask him again next time we meet and pay more attention, but the 7SM as used on bikes like the Cali 1400’s and early V85’s contains vast amounts more data and many more ‘Unknown’ parameters than the simpler ECUs of yore like the 15M and W5AM but then the MP11 is orders of magnitude larger again! Really, it’s huge! Not only that there are huge swathes of files and info inside it that will controll not only the fuelling and spark but the ride by wire parameters and safety features, the heat related advance decay curves and hosts of other things that unless you not only know what they do but how they interact with each other could be not only damaging but downright dangerous to be messing with. Apparently Alientech has some sort of software that allows access to the MP11 but from what I could gather from talking to Mark it is ECU and map specific meaning that if you do purchase it you need to pay some form of licence fee for each ecu or map it interacts with. I may be off the ball with this as it is way, way above my pay grade but the main take-away seemed to be that building a map for an individual MP11 was going to be hideously expensive! Up in the high hundreds of dollars! Per map/ecu! You can imagine your average Guzzi owner who is so mean they can peel and eat an orange without taking their hands out of their pockets lining up around the block for that can’t you? NOT! No doubt there will be the usual tribes of clueless charlatans jumping out from behind bushes waving their cheap fetishes to ward off the demons of ‘Power sapping emissions controls forced on us by the evil gubmint’ by tricking some aspect of the sensors to pour in and waste more fuel and damage the engine and environment for no gain but they’ve been around forever! Hopefully they won’t actually do anything downright dangerous, but who knows? Since I don’t think I’ll ever own one of these shiny, glittering monsters it doesn’t really matter to me. I retired yesterday. My shit all works. I’m good.

The pipes are all double walled, (Unless you’re running Arrow Titanium ones.) and they all tend to discolour. By how much very much depends on how much time you spend polishing. The stock pipes are stainless steel.

That’s a Corbin seat. No, passengers aren’t a thing with a Corbin. Mind you passengers have to be pretty masovhistic to get on the back of any Griso! I have a Corbin on Yellow Bike. It is a superb saddle for my fat arse!

Why would I be rattled by that? Most of what you say is, IMHO, correct. Where I would disagree is the combustion chamber shape. The 8V motor has a delightfully *modern* combustion chamber and I’m sure the air/fuel mixture that gets ignited in it burns pretty well. The attention to detail in regards to squish would seem to back this up if for no other reason than to clean the motor up. As you say the higher consumption is down to waste, not poor combustion and it’s not so much a need for ‘Resistance’ in the pipe/s although I too have used that description because it’s easier to understand, but a need to slow down the gasses exit and use the pipe harmonics to try and limit excessive charge loss on overlap. While I agree that there is a certain ‘Raw’ and unsophisticated feel to the earlier Hi-Cams the fact is they are much, much less efficient. Everything in them is heavier and the frictional losses in that motor are enormous which is the reason the factory was never able to get satisfactory, reliable, power out of it. It is also far more complex and heavy overall than the ‘Nuovo Hi-Cam’ and believe me, having humped enough of the wretched things around over the last sixteen years the new motor is no lightweight! Neither motor was at the time of their introduction, anywhere near the cutting edge of IC technology but head to head the later motor is superior in every way to Todero’s swansong.

Most of the ‘Poor mileage’ thing is or was to do with the shitty factory mapping, especially with the early maps, along with the problems associated with loud pipes/short pipes. Certainly if you ride around at higher rpm fuel economy plummets but that’s the result of the side draft heads and narrow included valve angle + cam timing. To get it to produce the *Needed* 100 RWHP the sacrifice was made in VE at higher rpm. As long as I’m not really sticking the spurs in both of mine will return 220-230Km before the fuel light comes on and that happens when there is still about 4.5 litres in the tank meaning my range is about 300+Km before I sputter to a halt. I don’t think that’s terrible? Yes, the flat tappet fiasco was a disgrace but it is what it is and once rollerised there are rarely further repercussions. While there are other issues with CARC series bikes generally most of them are now well known and usually easily addressed. I don’t see the 8V’s as any more or less reliable generally than the 2 valvers and both, using the W5AM controller, are prone to abuse by those ignorant of how the system works and the beetle-browed followers of the ‘Loud pipe and shitty air filter will make it go faster’ brigade! As most of you know, I’m an 8V evangelist. I love the motor and the CARC bike series and feel they were generally overlooked and ignored with no real justification. As for Griso? No, they aren’t for everyone but the day I can’t ride mine any more will be one of the saddest days of my life……

The one above certainly looks clean but the pipe without a dB killer is a problem. I suppose if you think making a ‘Look at me’ racket rather than actually having the engine perform well is your thing then fine but the 8V does not respond well to an open, (Or short!) pipe. It will gut the bottom end and midrange. The other thing I see that rings alarm bells is the crash-bars. Grisos actually tend to crash well but those bars, in fact any of the bars I’ve seen, are liable to direct force to the engine case/timing chest cover area and of they get damaged it’s essentially bye-bye engine. I personally would prefer to take the hit on a rocker cover and the oil cooler cover. If there is any more substantial damage it’s going to get written off anyway.

Actually you can use the rocker covers from any ‘Square Head’ 2-Valve model from 1983 to the end of 2-Valve production. The head castings are essentially identical for all of them so the mating surface joint is the same for head and rocker cover on all of them. From the MkIII LeMans and T5 all the way through to the very last Cali Vintages. All the same!

A 2013 Griso would have originally used the 1200cc, 8V Hi Cam motor. Presumably that was blown up and the entire motive unit was swapped out for one from a 2V 1200 Sport as the clutch and gearbox are not interchangeable between the two motive units. While the 2V motive unit would slip straight in to the later cycleparts there would be other issues to address like the inlet trumpets from the airbox to throttlebodies as the 8V used 50mm throttlebodies where as the 2V models use smaller 45(?) mm units.

Both the older 2-VPC models, both 850 and 1100, were made in the flat red. There were also a couple of runs of 1200-8V models with the flat red. The Griso was never produced with the 1200-2VPC motor, not in any colour. Apart from the swap to a roller top end in the middle of 2012 all the 1200-8V Grisos are essentially identical apart from the 2015 on models using the Cali 1400 sump. Both Bill Hagan and I had flat red Griso 1200’s. Here’s one of a much younger me and my Griso Pinko in LA!

While you’ve got the arse end out of it are you going to Loctite the pinion nut on the bevelbox as well? I’d advise it and it’s easy to do without disassembly. Use ‘Super Wick-in’ and just a couple of drops run down a thin screwdriver or even a satay stick onto the threads. It can save a lot of heartache.

I can’t remember exactly. Probably about 30,000km.