pete roper

They’re better than many but I still wouldn’t put them back in. What are the outer races like? Not like these I hope?

Do you hear a ‘Click’ from the relay which is in a block on the RH side under the seat. If you get a ‘Click’ but no start it’s probably Startus Interuptus. Well documented on the Ghetto.

I decided to put Red Bike up for sale today. It’s had the ‘Full Motomoda Treatment’ in case anyone’s interested in Oz. [img]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52767196911_28f284759f_b.jpg[/img] Shit. Can’t post pics here from a link.

The company’s name was ‘Staintune’, they made stainless steel exhausts, very nice ones back in the day. Their later products were shite.

My Griso makes a wonderful racket when I ‘Give it the berries’! Thing is it’s wonderful for me. The intake honk and exhaust note are just fine, and I ride with earplugs in every single ride because I’m half deaf from a youth of working on noisy motorbikes because everybody knew that noise=power! Really, pipe noise is simply a way of pissing other people off. They don’t want to hear your f*cking noisy motorbike! Now there are some machines that sound sublime, even if un-muffled. A V11 or Honda VTR with a full set of Staintunes are a couple of examples, but even then their use should be considered. Gunning it away from the lights in a built up area is, simply, antisocial. Any of the CARC bikes with a 2 into 1 system sound like shit anyway, the 8V’s particularly, if they are unmuffled, to the general public. Why piss people off? Especially as it will do absolutely nothing in terms of increasing performance??!!

The original can actually works well but it is very heavy. With the 8V motor pipe length is very important, a short pipe, like a wide open one, will gut the bottom end and midrange. It's a result of the head design and camming.

Noisy pipe doesn't make it faster. Less said about the 'Tune' the better. Snake oil salesmen gotta sell snake oil....

Well yes, but once again, at least over here, it depends which state you're in and also where in some states you are. In NSW in the area around me I can get away, usually, with that 65-75mph cruise easily enough. Open road limit is 100kph which is basically 62mph. Given the fact almost all speedos over-read by several kph and any tyre wear increases the discrepancy that 110-115kph indicated on the dash is close enough for Highway Patrol to generally leave you alone. Once you are further out west the open road limit goes up to 110 kph and cops tend to be fewer and further between anyway and I usually trundle along at an indicated 120-125. That may engender a headlight flash from any passing walloper but as long as you roll off a bit when you see them they'll rarely light you up properly and pull you over. Victoria is a whole other thing. Traffic enforcement there is draconian. They'll gleefully ping you for 3kph over the limit and once they've pulled you over you won't be getting a warning. They're humourless bastards as well. I've never been pulled in Queensland or Western Oz so I don't know what the go is there, or the Northern Territory for that matter. Tasmania the cops seemed fairly chill unless there has been a spate of mainlanders crashing and then they have a crack-down. Really though the way I ride nowadays, even on the Griso, I'm unlikely to attract an enormous amount of attention. Apart from anything else I'm acutely aware of not only my own physical limitations in terms of skill and perceptions but also the consequences of me 'Getting it wrong'! Quite simply I think any crash serious enough to break a bone would probably be the end of me. I'd actually prefer to avoid that! If I really wanted to push the envelope in my dotage I'd simply book a track day. Everyone is going the same way, there's tons of run-off and should the worst happen there'll be an ambulance on hand to scrape up the pieces! Far better than trying to go fast on the road with errant stock, wildlife, pensioners towing caravans, trees and other road furniture just off the bitumen. Going fast there is like playing Russian Roulette with several of the chambers loaded! Sod that for a game of soldiers!

If you simply roll off the throttle it simply slows down with moderate engine braking if in one of the 'Auto' modes. If you 'Change down' using one of the selectors it will move the pulley to whichever ratio is appropriate but with a higher engine speed so you get more braking. Hit the shifter again and it will move the pulleys to a higher point again and you can do that until it detects that going 'Down' another ratio will cause a dangerous over-rev. When the TCU detects that will happen it won't shift any further and let's you know by sticking a bloody great exclamation mark up on the dashboard screen! If using the 'Faux Manual' mode rather than there being a tacho there is a row of lights that illuminates across the top of the dashboard to warn you of the fact you're approaching the rev limiter and in the lower ratios as soon as they start appearing you'd better be ready to shift up as hitting the rev limiter with the throttle wide open can be, errrr? *Exciting* to say the least. I have no idea really what sort of engine speed the lights actually start appearing at. Only thing I know for sure is that in fully automatic 'Touring' mode the engine isn't spinning very fast at all when you're just cruising along at 100-110kph/60-70mph and it's very smooth and comfortable. To make more rapid progress, for overtaking say, simply crack the throttle open and the engine and transmission take over and you'll quickly find yourself doing the old 'Ton' with little effort. If you want it to it will happily cruise at 90+mph all day but it's not its forte. Just bimbling along at that 65-75mph zone is super relaxed and pleasurable.

The only Honda DTC bike I've ridden is the 1100, that was many years ago. It was blindingly fast and you could just *Feel* it was horrifically complex. It was utterly soulless as well. The Mana can seem a bit anodyne at times but the Honda was, for all it's blinding speed, just dull. We don't get, and never have, the DTC 750 twin in Oz. While the Mana is electronically complex the electronics are very reliable, my NA has given me no issues in 80,000km. The actual CVT transmission is very simple to work on, especially if you have the factory tools for belt replacement, (I do.) The reprogramming after belt replacement has now been sorted by the Guzzidiag crew so nobody needs to rely on a dealer any more for that!

Yup. The 'False Manual' mode simply moves the pulleys to one of seven positions/diameters and then the engine accelerates the vehicle until the next *Ratio* is chosen. In the full *Auto* modes the E-CVT simply allows the motor to wind to its maximum torque point, (In 'Touring'.) and then allows the pulleys to do the accelerating, (Up to a point.). With 'Sport' it simply moves the pulley take-over point up the rev range. 'Rain' mode is a sort of wimpy *Soft Cock* mode where turning the throttle doesn't seem to do anything much at all! In all honesty I see little point in 'Sport', 'Rain' or the false manual option. I just leave it in 'Touring' and ride it like the huge 'Twist and Go' it is. The only good aspect of the 'Manual' option is that even in the full-auto modes you can use the selector paddles or gear lever to 'Change Down' ratios to take advantage of engine braking at higher rpm. Useful on steep hills etc. Really though it's an absolute joy to ride in a relaxed manner. I've done some long, long days on both my NA in Oz and my GT in the US and got off feeling far fresher than I would of on a 'Conventional' motorbike. As I've said before, like Griso a Mana isn't for everybody. That doesn't mean it isn't a damn fine motorbike. Needless to say after saying I was going to leave it stock I'm already buying Andreani fork cartridges for it! I just can't help meself........

Well not actually *New* new but new to me. For years I've been wanting a Mana GT. This is the model with the full touring fairing as opposed to my 'Plain Jane' NA model. Well a couple of weeks ago one with a blown motor came up in Sydney for $950 so I bought it on a punt. Went and collected it last Wednesday and sadly, it's a shitter. Not worth me swapping the motor out of my NA into but only useful for spares. Not really a worry though as it came with a set of brand spanking new Sport Corsa tyres on it. They must of been put on the day the motor blew they're that new! That's half what I paid for the bike right there! Anyway I decided it was time to stop shilly-shallying around and found this on Gumtree Super clean, 40,000km and owned by an ex-customer of mine. Problem is it's in Perth so I have to get it shipped. My Givi luggage off my NA will bolt straight on and I'll be set for my touring steed for the rest of my days! It also means I can sell my Red Griso which was going to be set up as a tourer but the Mana makes far more sense.

Just buy a Stelvio one and mark the stick appropriately.

The valve clearance check procedure is essentially the same as all other twin cam Aprilias. Removing the cams isnt really a big deal but it could of been made so much easier by just having a plug in the front wall of the timing chest to allow insertion of the locking pin without removing the radiator and timing chest cover. I agree with you though. The chances of high mileage V100's being rebuilt are very slim. That just doesn't happen with modern machines nowadays.

No, from what I've heard the build quality has been pretty good but as with so many models before the bean counters were obviously allowed too much input and the ship has been spoilt for a ha'porth of tar. That leads to the issue of, especially with these sort of truncated designs as the Swiss thing above. I'll expand on this in a bit if you like but my beef is with everything behind the gearbox/swingarm spindle.

John, surely by now you know that ranting hyperbole is my stock and trade.

Anyone want to unpack why it’s ugly and stupid because it is both. Part of that is poor, cheap engineering of the platform. The thing is that those faults are exacerbated by the styling changes, not hidden or improved.

That people who do things like this should be castrated and choked with their own testicles That is all.

Blue smoke is highly unlikely to be valves. I can't remember if CBX's have valve guide oil seals. More likely to be a scored bore or a busted ring, most likely one of the inner cylinders with low compresh. Once, in a galaxy far, far away I had to do a head service on a CBX using Neway cutters. 24 tiny valves. It took a long time. I prefer not to think about it......

When I was a youngster I couldn't afford a car and the only motorbikes I could afford were old pieces of Pommy dross because by the mid nineteen seventies everybody with half a brain in the UK realised they were utter shite and they were therefore almost valueless. Sure we used to talk about 'Jap Crap' but that was because like all young men we were stupid automata whose every waking thought was driven by our penises. It didn't stop anyone who could afford it buying a Japanese bike though because they were just superior in just about every way! OK, so they didn't handle as well but that was simply because the crappy British junk didn't produce enough power to tug the skin off a rice pudding! Never mind over tax its frame! They all had shite brakes and the first thing you did with any Japanese motorbike was put new tyres on it! Back then all Japanese bikes had Bridgestones as OE and Bridgestone seemed to have developed a compound that has no grip but the wear properties of granite! Riding on them was like riding on something carved out of a Cairngorm, only slippery! My first real motorbike was a BSA A10 with a huge Watsonia sidecar on it. There was an anomaly in the road rules that meant you could ride a bike of any capacity if it had a chair attached. I had been forbidden by my parents to get a motorbike so it had to live at a mates place and I lived in perpetual fear that I'd be seen by my father who was a GP when he was out on his rounds, (These were the days when doctors still made home visits to people who weren't actually dying!). It also was the reason I got into mechanics as I certainly couldn't afford to have anyone else work on it so I had to teach myself how to maintain it, badly, but I never managed to do anything that actually killed me! Over the next few years I went through a load of other old shite. In fact anything that came my way that would actually propel itself down the road, no matter how wonkily, with me on board. I even had an Ariel 'Bleeder' at one point a bike that combined a startling amount of threadbare ugliness with a two stroke motor of profound lack of both performance and reliability! Utterly loathsome. I even at one point picked up a Ducati 350 MkIII valve spring model at one point. The only Ducati I ever owned it was unspeakably horrid as well. I somehow managed to scavenge a Desmo head for it from some weasly little spiv in Huntingdon, rebored it, ran it in super carefully and the first time I gave it 'The Berries' down the Sawston bypass it blew the crank out of the bottom of the cases. The only salvageable part of the whole motor was the bloody Desmo head! I sold it, and the cycleparts, back to the spiv who smirked and gave me less than I'd given him for the head. Bastard. Anyway, that gave me a lifetimes loathing for Ducatis that remains with me to this day! I returned to riding shitty Pommy bikes but by the early eighties I'd learnt enough to be dangerous and my last foray was with my little Triumph T500. It rolled off the production line the same year I did but over the, in hindsight, few years I had it I hotted it up to way over Daytona spec and it was, for what it was, a bit of a weapon. It would give GPz 550's a run in the traffic light GP but, because the little head was still doing the thinking, all the effort went into making it GO and none into making it STOP so it still had the single leading show front brake that wouldn't lock the front wheel even in the wet! It was a f*cking death trap! I have no idea how I survived it! Along the way I had one of my favourite bikes of all time. A Jawa 350 with a Velorex chair. What a wonderful thing that was! And a revelation! Unlike the Triumph which would gleefully 'Nom-Nom-Nom' a timing side main bush every 5-6,000 miles the Gentle Jawa was stone axe reliable, had brakes that worked and would carry me, the girlfriend and a mate and all our camping gear down to Devon for the weekend AND get us back to London afterwards. Soon after I met Jude in '83 and wooed her by taking her to Paris in the spring on the Triumph, (Which for once didn't break down!) I decided enough was enough. Doing complete engine rebuilds every 5-6,000 miles had whiskers on it so I looked around for something else that wasn't a total nail. A few weeks later an ad popped up for a Moto Guzzi V50-II. A brand I knew nothing about but a bit of research said it was a pushrod twin so I knew it would be simple and it had, 'Gasp!' Shaft drive! It was also very cheap. I found out why when I when to look at it. The then owner was even more youthful and obviously feckless than me! He'd rattle canned the whole bike black! Everything! Forks, brake rotors, tyres, the lot! What a knob! But it was cheap so I took it away, scraped the paint off it and proceeded to thrash it mercilessly for a year or two and it never went wrong! I sold it when I went to Oz with Jude in '83 and when we returned at the end of 84 I used a small inheritance I'd been left by an aunt I ended up buying an SP 1000 that I owned for twenty years and took with me when I emigrated to Oz in '88. After going Italian I never looked back. Those Pommy bikes of the post war years had only one redeeming feature. They taught you how to wield a spanner! Why? Because you had to. The odds of you getting anywhere without being stranded or run over when you sputtered to a halt in the pouring rain, at the bottom of a hill, in the dark were very high. But unless you were riding on a day that didn't end in a Y that was what was going to happen. Dear god they were awful! Many people forget that and view the past as halcyon days to be viewed through rose tinted specs but the reality was much harsher. The only 'Good' thing about the 'Good Old Days' is that they are gone and anyone who says otherwise needs a 'slap up the head'! Bugger Norton! I fart wetly and lavishly at them, with pinpoint accuracy!

I never rode a Hesketh but I do remember on the few occasions I saw one they looked like they needed a wading pool to park in to keep the oil anywhere near them. They were like a colander with a wheel at either end!

Norton is like a fish that has been caught, gaffed, hauled into the boat, bonked on the head, taken back to shore and then flops out of the ice bucket, slips off the jetty and manages to flap off before anyone can fillet it and do anything useful with it! Every time some new grifter buys the name some shitty version of what was basically a 500cc platform with a non unit gearbox is trotted out with great fanfare claiming, like Hesketh, (remember them?) that it's going to be the revival of a 'Great British Name!'. @#!#$# off with this noise! Norton is dead. It died, with the rest of the British motorcycle industry, at the beginning of the Second World War. Yes, Joe Craig continued to develop the pre war 'International' OHC motor in the race shop and it continued to be competitive, at least on the tighter circuits, as the Manx. But post war the models offered to the public were your quintessential 'Grey Porridge'. Horrid, slow, shitboxes like the 16H and later the twins in the form of the 'Atlas' and, (Smirk!) 'Dominator'. Models that were so vibratory, not to mention unreliable, that the Dominator was ruefully known as the 'Morecome Flagelator' due to its propensity for shaking loose fillings and shedding bits of itself like confetti as its owner wheezed from breakdown to breakdown! The 'Commando's' were even worse! Yes, they were pretty, yes the name has a certain, (Thouroughly undeserved) reputation for??? Well? Something good? But they weren't. They were awful. Just like everything else made by the British motorcycle industry post-war. How do I know this? Because I lived through the death thoes of the industry and it was pathetic to watch. The only thing more pathetic is seeing a seemingly inexhaustible queue of dolts with rose tinted specs queuing up fo be fleeced by whatever grifting spiv has bought the name off the last grifting spiv who is cackling into his bank account in some tax haven that doesn't have an extradition treaty to anywhere they can be taken to task. FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THINGS DECENT! LET NORTON'S ZOMBIE CORPE REST! Its a turd that keeps on giving!

Yes, we got bikes with the 15M-RC and lambda input but not until pretty late in the day. A quick gurn at the parts lists says 2003 models got Lambda input.

Also, if you've tried to run it with stale gas make sure you purge the line to the injectors and then replace the spark plugs as well. If it has fired, even briefly, on the old gas it may well of fouled the old plugs to the point where under stress in the combustion chamber during compression the spark will track down the insulator rather than jumping between the electrodes and won't ignite the mixture. This is very common, especially with modern fuels.