Leaderboard

Bravo, man! Thanks for the vid! Home from a delightful 100 mile loop through the hills and hollers. Found this tasty 8% Einstök Winter Ale. Makes me think of Tomchri: "IPA time! "

Happy new year, guys!

A light Italian roast with Norwegian cream please. I haven’t ridden this poor bike since I sold the Ducati. Hopefully I’ll get out on it more this winter.

Just managed to lube the drive shaft. The advice here was great and helped heaps. Thank you. After reading everyones experience I decided to go the full hog and remove the wheel, transmission, one end of the rear shock and drop the swing arm just to get to the front grease nipple. I am glad I did because most of the bearings, joints and blots associated with the shock,swing arm and drive were pretty dry. I inspected everything, regreased and reassembled it all in about two hours. The LHS rear wheel bearing was clunky so I made sure it was well greased and will replace that when the tyre gets replaced in a few thousand miles. In fact, doing all this when the wheel is off for a tyre change seems to make a lot of sense and as the tyre lasts around 5K (about two to three years for me) the maintenace of everything in that area can be brought in line with that activity. I also change the fluid in the clutch at the same time. That was dead easy with all the other shit out the way. The best tool I had for the whole job was a hydraulic lift/stand. That made life so much easier and I didnt need to modify any other tools.

New Year in Okla. Snow and mix from the Rio Grande to Kansas. Only thing to do is stay in and have John's frittata and a Bloody Mary.

If you already own the 2017 edition of Falloon's "Complete History", his 2020 "centennial" edition is a disappointment as it is only an update of the 2017 one (i.e. same text and pictures for everything pré-2017). Is that all that could be done to mark the 100th anniversary? Similar to previous editions, the section on the varies V11 special series remains disappointingly succinct....

What I find hopeless docc is when a caption on an image describes something fitted that actually isn't. You dont need to be a Guzzi expert to see when a front brake isn't fitted on an old 1920's motorcycle but the caption goes to great lengths to highlight the fact it has the "optional" front brake, hopeless. I have just genuinely skimmed the text in this book so I'm not looking at it in detail. I also noted an image of a Mk4 lemans described with black rocker covers for the year model. My friend had one which we collected from Agostinis in Mandello in 86 and I can tell you they were a very dark blue, not black. Falloon lives in Melbourne, I should track him down and give him some feedback. Ciao

So, I received the new Falloon book today. It is nicely printed and large format (much larger than the May 1999 Falloon book I have). A very nice "coffee table book" with large, mostly color images (many that are new to me). I recall the inaccuracies about the V11 Sport in the 1999 book, but forgave them as it was all new and largely unknown. It is a frank disappointment to read those same inaccuracies twenty years on! When I read errors about something that I know about, it casts doubt on information about other models I am not familiar with. So, alas, "not a reference book." The second place (after the early V11 Sport) I look to assess an author's knowledge of Moto Guzzi is their discussion of the development of the big block V-twin. In the 1999 work, I gave credit that Falloon declared Carcano's " . . . Fiat engine can really be considered the predecessor of the V7 . . ." This 2020 edition states "The engine powering the V7 was descended from the earlier Fiat and 3x3 . . ." What a load of crap! What absolutely deplorable journalism. This is the kind disinformation that perpetuated the "tractor motor" myth in Mick Walker's, and now Falloon's, series of progressively less accurate books. Thank goodness for Greg Field!! [Rant over. For now.] Nice picture book! Now I am anxious to hear what @p6x finds in this MotoItaliane pubication . . .

FWIW, I asked Tomchri what "Norwegian cream" is. Of course, no surprise, he said: " IPA time! "

Thanks for posting that, Andy! I tried to figure out where to cut my collar, but on the early, ShortFrame Sport, it looks to be the swingarm tunnel, itself, that blocks the angle of the grease gun. Pretty sure I better not cut a hole in that. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what is different between the ShortFrame and LongFrame that makes the early Sports so $#%#%^%& difficult to "that bloody farking front UNI joint?"

If you have not put everything back together you can take that front u-joint cover off and cut a bigger hole in order to get a grease gun on the zerk. If you feel like it. I did not relish the idea of that disassembly every time I put a tire on. (which used to be 3-4 times a year) Should be a thread on it somewhere in here. Andy

I never put my bike away. Looking to get up to near 60 early next week and 50s until next weekend's cold spot. I can usually find more comfortable days to ride this time a year than late July-early Aug. Of course, I'd rather be in Colorado then even with the afternoon rain showers there. This has been an unusual winter, the jet stream has angled south and we're getting the winter storms from the southwest which seem weird. This storm came straight from the south with rain/mix from the Mexico border (Rio Grande) all the way to Kansas. From here it's heading NE, snow north and rain south in it's path.

......and a Happy New Year!

Interesting. It is my observation that captioned images, and their subsequent interpretations, are part&parcel of the stupid "tractor motor" debacle among other poor archiving. Falloon's earlier work (2007, Moto Guzzi Sport & LeMans Bible) detailed the V7 (big block V-twin) in good detail. So disappointing that the latest work devolves. Why?!?

Definitely priced well. Looks like it was pretty well cared for.

I believe Bad Mofo is the correct terminology..

Buon 2021 a tutti

Some lovely pictures that Grant Vinten collected here. Girls and Bikes. http://v2guzzi.blogspot.co.nz/

video no workie