Gmc28

you sure thats not an african graduated cylinder? it's all a matter of how you grip it... My beloved Red needs some of that TLC. Looking and running fine, but has been a dearth of V11 riding this year so far, so for me its "what have you not done to your V11 today", sadly. I watch your goings-on with some jealousy. But sounds like I may be back in Mandello, briefly, in September.

top of my list in a few years when I “cut back on work”, which is my version of retirement, is to spend a bunch of time touring australia. the missus will go, so it’ll be a combo of renting a bike for some strategic touring here and there, as sub-routines of the main car or camper touring with her.

well hold now.... its takes all kinds, and if we were all the same it would be rather boring. and look what entertainmnet came from it all in this thread. and pretty funny, moto guzzi owners calling someone else diseased. thats a gem!

since there are other V85tt owners on this forum, figured i'd add a comment or two here on my ongoing relationship with the V85, for any that may be interested. Maybe take the liberty to have this be a little bit more of a V85tt thread. over the winter, i skipped the Guzzitech mods after some consideration (another story) and just did a SAS delete, Agostini exhaust/decat, added the heated grips via the popular mod from WildGuzzi (popular aftermarket slip-on heated grips which we tie into the factory switch), and a few other odds and ends, and all worked out great. Just an incredibly pleasant bike. Still doesn't strike me as a beautiful machine, but one of the best all-around machines i've owned, based on my current perspective (which has been known to change...). i'm done taking her off-road, other than gravel and such, for while she handled all that just fine last year, it was cruel abuse, and I'm just happier on a real off-road bike when on single track and fire roads. win-win. next i'll likely go for the fork cartridge inserts/upgrades, that were well spoken of at John Day last year by other V85-ers. front end is ok, but would benefit from some upgrade. the rear hugger fender i sourced from a chinese site works well, but the mounting setup is crap. It won't fall apart, but its hokey, so will noodle a better way to attach it. Fyi for anyone interested in a hugger. I live on a gravel road, so tend toward those kind of mods more than i would if I didn't live on gravel. i've mostly had (and have) older bikes, so was mildly shocked to learn that AF-1 had gas tank body work for sale, new-in-box, to match factory paint scheme. for a couple hundred bucks i was able to clean up the cosmetic damage (replace it) from the rash the previous owner did to it. the damage is what helped me get the bike at a great discount, which i figured i'd just live with, but was a cheap fix and she looks like new.

some great weather for that shot (and ride). none of the birds I work with or fly are as sexy as the fighter or the older birds that Chuck gets to play with. Well, not since we had to retire the DC-7's... they were lovely old gals. (captured here by someone at an opportune time with the lightning).

heck yes…. been on my bucket list for while, to get over to the motherland to tour, for the beautiful scenery, family roots, and the decent handful of nordic guzzi folks over there, like Tom! But playing tour guide for my own family on recent visits has cramped my riding options. eventually will work it in.

Or i think i’ll put the license plate on one of my odyssey batterys. Like a harley… larger and with less power, but thats ok because it’s heavy too!

hopefully i’m not straying too far from the OP’s thread title when i add a couple more non-Odyssey notes: Have been unable to get one of my Odyssey back to holding a charge, using the simple version of the discharge and charge cycle process noted here. Worked for another one, but i’ve got one approx 10yr old that isn’t responding well. I may need to read further to get beyond the caveman version of the process I had been using. but then, 2 Li-ion notables: one back from the dead (maybe old news to some, but was new for me), and another one performing after 8+ years… As noted elsewhere here, myself and Murphy combined to create the perfect snake-eyes roll, when I put a new Earth-X battery in my 1200 Duc, which after cringing at what i paid for it, then after riding it for about a week and leaving it down south at a friends place, had a relay failure causing a complete discharge of the expensive Li-ion Earth-x, down to 1.4 volts. To use the scientific term, killed it deader-n-hell. After replacing it with regular Batteries Plus sourced AGM (all i could find locally there) I looked at the Earth-X forlornly on the bench for the last several months. It wouldn’t take a charge from any of the various chargers I have, not surprisingly, but including my old-school bulk charger. But then I got a reminder/tip from one of our A&P’s at work: jumper the battery with another charged battery, then connect the smart charger. The smart charger will see enough voltage from good battery to begin its process, then disconnect the good battery, and see what happens. I did it out in the gravel driveway, as there was no guarantee things wouldn’t get out of control on the batt temp. But voila… it’s back. holding full voltage for several days now. (will load test it later this week) Then, one of the old riding mowers battery died. On a lark I popped in an old Shorai Li-ion I had on the bench, which I had pulled out of my KTM 990 about 7 yrs ago, to replace it with an Odyssey, to make it, in my mind, more reliable for shipping it off to alaska for several years. that Shorai was in used condition when i bought the bike, and had been drained down to around 8v due to another issue on that KTM which took me years to find (via half-assed efforts, admittedly). I had charged it back up, but assuming that from such a deep discharge, and being old, that its days were numbered. But it held a charge nicely, and used it for little projects over the years. Now, at least 8yrs later, popped it into the old riding mower, and it worked like new. A couple of cold and warm starts on the old Briggs & Stratton were better then ever (lots of CCA on that Shorai). I don’t know how the charging system on the mower will treat the Li-ion, so i’ll be watching that. but a somewhat interesting data point regarding life span on an old Li-ion that had seen some abuse.

I’ll move this to another thread, but it would be interesting to hear where in MN that your grandfather came to. Plenty of scandinavians in Minnesota, hence the name of the NFL team and all that, but on the other hand its amazing how often and quickly I find a shared history and/or ancestry thread with the Norwegians I run into all over. That little town of Houston MN apparently was first really settled by a couple norwegians, the Omodt/Birkeland’s (a couple years after a civil war fellow started there), who my cousin in Oslo says were the “bridgehead to america” for a string of Norwegians that followed. We’re a bunch of immigrants, like most americans (or, arguably, all people)…. hope I don’t get deported! 😎 Aside from the lack of mountains, its some nice country, and a pleasant place to explore on a motorcycle. maybe some day.

only a shot glass… sounds like a fast-fingers trick was involved?

lovely indeed. Fall there I suppose, but how wet does it get around Canberra in the winter? I spent a couple days in Canberra about 5yrs ago, but was so busy it was a blur. Need a month or two off to tour around, or even more as it’s a helluva big country, and the areas I’d like to tour are spread all over. Just need that winning Lotto….

helluva setup there Tom! Just arrived in Minnesota tonight, tomorrow making the drive to Houston, Minnesota, to see where the norwegian ancestors came over to establish the "bridgehead to america" around 1850. Probably be more fun to be in norway in your garage.

other "air" in the tanks. rather than the usual nitrogen/oxygen/other mix, its a different concoction of gases to achieve certain things, like to avoid nitrogen narcosis at deep depths, or nitrox to allow for different dive times, etc.

i've not done the puerto madryn, which sounds excellent. But I did my inital scuba training and first year or two of diving all in Alaska. I did it all drysuit, though others used thick wetsuits. Was a great way to learn, and a unique place to dive and see. I fondly recall the first real dive, where it was snowing, gray, miserable, and with the drysuit and insulation I needed about 45lbs on my belt plus 4 lbs per ankle, so i'm sweating, damn uncomfortable, feeling like a beached whale, wondering why i'm doing this, and then I backed into the water and voila, of course it all changed.... awesome. Now weightless, "cool" (no longer hot from the suit, nor freezing from the water), with Sea lions, schools of black cod, wrecked boats and airplanes, etc. Getting that drysuit dialed in was key. took some time and focus to get it just right... not so tight on the seals that its painful, but tight enough to not leak. did some mixed gas diving too.

Good point. Though when staying submerged even in most tropical waters, the energy gets sapped fast to where i can get cold. But that’s where scuba diving, where slow and easy movements are name of the game, whereas with no weight belt with snuba I’ll bet the extra work to control buoyancy would keep the blood pumping more, and be warmer.

So a smaller version of the old Snuba setup, right? almost bought a snuba for a Caribbean sail trip, but I had to cancel trip for work, and never pulled trigger. Just seems way easier for shallow, tropical diving than the tanks. But wondering about weight belts, and buoyancy control in that first 1/2-1 atmosphere of change, where we like to dive and where snuba would be the ticket .

I don’t want to derail activepops thread here, but to indulge just a little more…. where’d you find tire irons with the axle nut wrenches on the ends for the husky? great idea… two large-ish tools combined into one. love that idea. Update: quick google search reveals lots of options… imagine that. It’s now dark and rainy, so i’ll get out tomrrow and check those axle nut sizes. my 501 I use on road as well, connecting sections of off-road, or to get home on all tarmac after days of going 1 direction off road, so i haven’t gone down the tubliss path, though i was going to on my former “all dirt” bike. I’m toying with a handlebar mount tool bag now for the 501, and a frame mounted tube for tire irons. problem on the 501 is lack of rear subframe to attach that tool cylinder. I used the slime product for years in mexico on our ATV’s, and basically 3/4 of the time it was all that was needed. seems like more often on the off-road 2-wheelers the flats can be more problematic and not sufficed with slime, mostly because it tends to only work well with the tubeless setups.

i rented one of those large guzzi’s down near Joshua Tree a few years back, for a couple days of touring the park and other areas up north of there. I enjoyed it, preferring it over the Harleys i had way back. that said, they all fall into the same problematic category for me: they are the best type of bikes for cruising down the big highways, which is exactly where i do NOT want to be on a bike, except to connect to other non-highway roads.

I hear ya. funny how much time i’ve spent over the years thinking i’ll just get a nice little kit for each bike, then each year I get on a bike and realize it has only a partial kit or no kit, because I probably went on a big ride in previous year and robbed an item from it. should be so easy, but the tire kit gremlins are sneaky little bastards… Small is the usual and obvious goal, so for me the dynaplug little setups are what i usually get (which seem overpriced, but I usually end up with those as they’re small and they work), then either a few co2’s and the adaptor, just to get me to someplace for a proper air fill, or if its a bigger bike with carrying capacity i’m now popping in one of the Fantik (costco, amazon) cordless inflators, since i use those for more subtle pressure adjustments as well. But it’s the off-road bikes with tubes that give me the headaches… hate having to carry irons, a tube, and all that, because its so much stuff, its a drag to have to use on the trail, and on those kind of bikes there’s less room and more stuff needed. For ADV bikes i just get or convert to tubeless, but dirt bikes i’m always fiddling with “smaller” vs “easier to use”, based on what mood i’m in that day.

Fair enough, good point. Though I’d attribute that to the tiny bit of bubble-action we might see when doing a regular brake bleed. Common over the years for me when I KNOW I’ve bled the new fluid through, there shouldn’t be any more visible air, but still that occasional little bubble is seen, so I end up pumping more, but it never really goes away. The vac bleed was giving the same kind of huge air bubbles/gaps I’d been getting when even hand bleeding, and with two different slaves & bleed valves. Still unsolved mystery in my head, though maybe that is the issue, and just using a tiny bit of vacuum and letting it “pull” really slow would be the test for that, along with grease on the threads.

long pause…. got distracted with other mx projects, then shuffled my way back over to the Gran Canyon. nothing was working, including tying off the lever, but walking away from it for a while allowed the proper “re-focus”, reminding myself “oh ya, the old suction bleeder…”. so I dug that out where its been sitting for years, and rigged it up. Got some fluid to flow, but still with tons of air, and could not get a clean, solid flow still. Stumped, and annoyed, I closed the bleed valve after a sucking through a couple reservoirs full of Dot 4, scratched my head, then just absent mindedly grabbed the lever. It worked. Tried again…. solid resistance, felt perfect. Hmm… there was a ton of air coming out of that slave still when I last closed the valve, but now it seems fine. went back out last night, tried again, felt great, started it up (purrs like a kitten…. or maybe a bit of a young lion, as my sons carbon cans on that 904cc duc motor have no inserts, so she’s a bit noisy, in a not-unenjoyable way, despite me loving quiet bikes), and clutch worked great for a quick test ride. so, good that it works. but still annoyed with what just happened. That much air coming out when bleeding has always meant no way it’s going to work right and needs more bleeding. Need the scooby doo mystery mobile team to solve the mystery.

Not sure I follow what you're saying, but am interested! My Norwegian language skills are just barely above "zero", though I try, so i'm not complaining. Sounds like you did take the beauty for a spin and she wasn't behaving?

So many Norwegians! Love it. I’ve had mixed luck with the modern computer match options, but if you’ll paint the whole part then that’s easy, as the computer is definitely close enough for that. It’s just for juxtaposing stock with painted panels, or (god forbid) blending, where it’s risky.

slightly odd that the picture of the bike in the ebay post doesn’t appear to be showing the kit installed, just a stock setup. ok, not a great way to show what the kit does. I think Activepop installed a set, though i haven’t heard what he thought of them. I’m quite fond of mine, part of a couple minor tweaks that makes Red noticeably more comfortable than goldie, even though same year & model.

And she’s in lovely company, with a blue (less common) ST4, and a red 1st gen multistrada, bikes i enjoyed riding, each unique in their own way.