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Did about 230 miles on the Norge today. Got lost several times over trying to find the road to Norge, Oklahoma. Talk about your wide spot in the road!
Well, I love the Norge. It's a Guzzi, it has all of the modern stuff like ABS, heated grips and so forth, yet still has that decades old mill, just updated a whole bunch.
There's a lot of good things about the bike. I'm 5'10" and with the windscreen up fully, the airflow exactly touches the very top of my helmet. If I squat a half-inch, it gets pretty quiet, sit up too tall and it gets a lot noisier. For me, it's nearly perfect, a taller rider would opt for a higher screen when such becomes available.
The seat is fairly comfortable but I'm thinking it's a little stiff, but then, I haven't ridden a bunch of miles in the last few years so my butt (and the rest of me) is out of shape. One thing is for sure, this is a bike that wants to ridden with your spine straight. My usual slouch didn't cut it. My wife will appreciate my change in posture after I've been riding this thing for a few months. It remains to be seen whether this is a high mileage day seat or not. I only did the 230 or so today and that was broken up with a visit to Russ Marooney, the Norge photo and some Christmas shopping for the better half. Better half? Hell, she's superior. Only a superior woman encourages her husband to buy a motorcycle like this. But I digress...
The electric controls for the windscreen are very BMW'sh in that up is on the left handlegrip and down is on the right and neither one is easily reached without removing your hand from the grips.
Handlebar position to me is just a hair flat and about a half-inch high. YMMV.
The footpegs feel about an inch too high but I think they're adjustable and will get to that in time. The shifter - as supplied - has the toe peg too far forward for my smallish 8 1/2 size feet (and let's not go there, shall we) and the shift lever is angled downwards quite a bit. The shifter felt like it was cutting my toes in half on the up shifts. Adjusting the eccentric on it to the 45˚ position (looking at it dead on from the left side of the bike) helped a lot but it still seems a bit far forward and too far down. If the footpegs are adjustable, that should alleviate that.
The steering is very light. I'm used to driving the truck like Sport 1100i and the reasonably nimble V11 Sport and the Norge is a ballet dancer compared to those two. If you're used to the slower steering Guzzis of old, it takes a few miles to get the swing of it. The bike bobbles minimally when in the draft of a large truck at speed and side winds don't seem too bothersome even with the high sail area of the rear top trunk. I've never owned or ridden a touring bike before so that observation not be entirely salient.
The left footpeg vibrates some, the right little at all and overall vibration levels are quite a bit less than a V11 Sport. Acceleration is very good with the 5000 max break in RPM showing about 82 mph on the speedometer.
The gauges are good and don't seem to suffer from some of the Veglia characteristics we've all come to know and loathe in the past. I don't know who makes these though. The indicator lights are sharp and clear and the light show at start up is fascinating.
A simple touch of the starter button does it all. Nothing else required. Real nice.
So what's not to like? The LCD display and the mirrors. To a lesser extent, the left side controls and the shift and brake levers. And to no extent at all - the shifting.
The LCD display: Real good when backlit at night. During the day, it's very difficult make anything out and is dependent on the angle of sunlight hitting it. Worse, some functions such as the heated grip indicator, do not display in some modes. It's confusing getting the mode right when you can't see the display clearly. The real killer is if you're wearing some sort of sunglasses - the display nearly goes away completely. At night though, it's a miracle of red illumination reminiscent of the lights used on water fountain light shows. Very attractive. Being used to green all these years, it comes as a shock, albeit a pleasant one.
The mirrors: Not too good. One of mine is distorted severely across the bottom, although I can ignore it because it is the bottom. Somewhere else, and it would intolerable. That's not the worst part though. Apparently, the production line has a cruddy die or something for threading the mirror stalk shafts and/or nuts. The factory probably thought they were tightenend properly at installation. The dealer didn't find anything wrong with them at delivery and I didn't find anything wrong with them until I was about 8 miles from home. Then they started flopping around. Guess what isn't in the stock toolkit? A 17mm wrench. And you know what wrench is require to tighten the mirror stalk couplings - right? Uh huh, a 17mm wrench. For the next 35 miles I kept pushing the mirrors back into place only to have them resume flopping around after a few minutes. At Russ's house, I borrowed the requisite wrench and tightened them down. Tested them - and they flopped again. Tightened them down hard enough to worry about breaking something and they seemed okay. They were'nt. 15 miles down the road the right side mirror started flopping around again. I'm thinking that the threads are kind of gnarly from a dull die and that pulling the thing apart and chasing the threads with a fine file will cure the problem. Some kind of thread lock may be required in the long run, but I'm going to want them positioned perfectly before using that solution. After-market mirrors may be the better solution.
Left side controls: There I was at the stop light, sending my right and left turn signals into a frenzy while I thought I was changing the mode button. User error. Still...
Brake lever. You have to angle your foot in quite a bit to hit it. The first time I went to hit the rear brake pedal, I thought it had fallen off. Don't tell me this is a user error. It takes some getting use to.
Shift lever. IMHO, the lever stub is too small in diameter and it digs into your foot badly when being used. I think I'll put another layer of neoprene or rubber around it to increase the diameter, or make a wider flatter stub.
The transmission. Shifts slicker than any Guzzi transmission I've ever used. There isn't any downside whatsoever - unless - you're one those guys (I am) that constantly lift the lever after last gear or down into first gear to confirm that you're at the limit of the gears. On the older transmissions, the lever would move without doing anything. On this one, it stays put, which is putting a crimp on my bad style. The Honda ST1300 does exactly the same thing.
Niggling little things: The owners manual is in six languages, each using about a hundred pages. It's like a small telephone book. Only the last 100 pages or so are in English but to carry it around, you'll have to tear it up a bit or waste a chunk of space.
All in all, it's a damn nice bike. With a bit more acclimatization, I should begin to truly appreciate it's virtues.
Does the Norge meet my expectations? Yes.
MultiQuote
Posted 14 December 2006 - 11:51 AM
I had a similar problem with the sport. I was too timid to tighten it. I took it back and let Bob tighten it. I figured if he broke it, he'd replace it.
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