pete roper

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.

I know someone has done it. @Moto maybe? I was thinking of doing the same because of all the bling and trickery on modern RBW machines the only one other than ABS that I would really like would be cruise. I simply haven't worked up the enthusiasm to do it yet though and since I've been riding Grisos since 2006 I tend to think the likelihood of me ever getting enthusiastic enough is probably pretty slight!

Too big. They should use one of the smaller Piaggio singles to chase custom. Better yet an electric vehicle.

For all of you cynics the fact is that the Tonti models are very good motorbikes. Not as good as the Aprilia/Piaggio models that superseded them but back in the day, the day being the mid 1970's, but there was a lot of charm in that era. The early 'Short Head' Tonti models were pretty impressive. Sadly, in the mid eighties the 'Market' changed. People, (And I'm mainly talking about you USA!) wanted 'Bigger' motorbikes. Not just capacity but also, more importantly, physical size! Anyone who has ridden an un-f*cked Mk III LeMans back to back with a 'Big Valve', 'Tall Head' Mk IV, V or 1000S would have to be mentally defective to think that the earlier model was inferior to the latter one! That doesn't though mean that the later models, 'Sport' or 'Cruiser' are shit! They are fine, competent motorbikes and the Cali 1100, even with Bill's chunder inducing 'Hot Dog and Mustard' paint job are actually great touring motorbikes! In the unlikely event I ever go back to the US for another tour, (I'd love to, but 'Reasons'.) the fact is with Cali prices being so low I'd be terribly tempted to take a punt on something like this $2.5K shitter, use it for my trip and just abandon it at the airport when I left leaving the title and keys stuffed in the tank and ignition. Or donate it to some charitable agency. It would be much cheaper than hiring or buying a more *Modern* bike. Cheap, pretty bulletproof bike, that you can ride trans-continental for next to nothing! Really, what's not to like!

NGK have ceased production of plug caps. This mob have stepped into the breach. http://kandstech.com/productreleases/sprc.pdf

Lots of people don't understand the laws of physics too.........

I've built two single spark 1400's. There is a lot of work involved. Torque is prodigious. Outright power increase is minimal. Enlarging the motor produces big difficulties with oil expulsion/crankcase pressurisation. As you say the oil cooling circuits between the single spark and twin spark engines are entirely different and I've never heard an adequate explanation of how these people have addressed that issue. The reason why much greater power is well nigh impossible to get is because of the side draft head design, narrow included valve angle and combustion chamber shape. Effect of cam changes will be minimal. I don't doubt that they are fun to ride, I just don't get why people have to make silly claims for them.

Oh for fucks sakes. Yeah, believe it. Then look at where the torque and horsepower graphs cross. There are also huge problems with crankcase pressurisation and oil expulsion if you increase the swept volume of the motor. I do tire of this bullshit.

Bloody wogs!

Daytona, Centy and Sport-I all use the 16M controller to the best of my knowledge.

Sounds a bit ominous. Hope you're OK.

Just wondering why you've decided to sell?

(Pathetic whimpering noise from Aussie who would crawl seven miles over broken glass to stick matches in your turds for such a bike but is too poor to do so now he's retired and couldn't bring it here anyways......) Bargain!

The earlier pork chops are unfortunately pretty fragile. Any early spiney that has been up the road should really have them removed and crack tested as they do crack if crashed and although they will continue to work for awhile when they do finally let go it tends to be catastrophic as they are what supports the swingarm. Once the integrity of one fails things go to hell in a handbasket bloody quickly and due to the nature of the failure it tends to happen in high speed/high load situations.

Let me have a dig. Sorry, I was busy this arvo and forgot.

Nah, but I'm pretty sure I've got a couple lying about in the 'Mountain of munt'. I'll have a look, if I do it's yours, just make a donation to MSF for the cost of the postage, which won't be a lot if I don't insure it or anything daft like that. Actually, what's wrong with yours? If it simply won't grip the mirror stem any more that is easily addressed by wrapping the bottom of the stem in a bit of shim stock to fatten it up a bit so the vanes of the olive are a bit wider when the nut clamps them.