Skeeve

I'm in.

Um... no slams that I've seen. In fact, the only comparison to your "schmaltzy & sentimental" comment is that it's the first 100% universal motorcycle movie. You know, as in "Urinals are 50% universal. Everyone knows what they are, but we men, we gotta work'em!" In this case, you can expect to take a non-motorcyclist to see it & not hear any complaints [unlike a movie about, say, the 1986 Gran Prix season, which to non-motorcyclists & even many motorcyclists would be akin to being dragged back to their high school biology lecture "... & the cell undergoes meiosis blah blah..." ;-) ] The only reviews I've seen about this have been very positive, to the tune of "if you ride a motorcycle, you absolutely, positively cannot miss this movie!" Heck, I'm always up to see Sir Anthony Hopkins chewing on the scenery, even when he's forced to drag a 200# dumbell around on the set with him[1]... Ride on! [1] Obligatory Baldwin bros. reference

Congrats, Carl! Now that you've got the Wimhurst generators cranking just right & the Jacobs Ladders sparking, reverse the poles from + to minus & back, and scream "IT'S ALIIIYVE!!" & get outta that monster's way!

I was going to protest "a caplock, at least!" but I think you're right. A '66 Yellowboy in 44 Henry flat (a blackpowder rimfire cartridge), at the very minimum...

Pistons get oil & air circulating against them, as well as piston rings against the cylinder walls to conduct heat away. Anyway, I was more concerned about the heat & exhaust gasses maybe leading to excessive decomposition of the aluminum [esp. when placed in contact w/ a dissimilar metal] Copper has a long history in plumbing [which is what all that exhaust piping amounts to anyway] - aluminum doesn't, even after it became cheaper than copper. Just throwin' it out there, not saying I would turn up my nose to an Al piece!

EXcellent!

My only caveat would be to make it out of copper, instead of aluminum, due to it's higher melting point [we are talking about exhaust connectors, here! ]

WRT: "ride it home from the factory" - You probably could, if you could get a URAL over there, but AFAIK, you can't because the URAL is built solely to the Ural USA specs for this market. Seriously, the guys here who set up to import these unadulterated pieces of Soviet cr@p initially, & then stuck with it while educating the newly freed Russkies as to the nature of free market capitalism ["No, nobody will buy your Soviet-era turds now that they no longer have to do so; you simply must empty the swarf out of the cases before bolting them together..."] WRT: "slow, ugly old tractor" - The USA has shown a fondness for old, slow, ugly vehicles, as long as they get the job done & don't require toolsets much more complicated than a pair of adjustable spanners ["Crescent wrenches," for those of you edjucated enough to know their proper name! ] and a 3# sledge. Come to think of it, this is another case of "Americans & Russians having more in common than they think..." ;D As far as "what makes Urals appealing to Guzzi owners" - What other bike can you think of that makes a Guzzi look like the pinnacle of high performance, yet has the redeeming feature that you can ride it in the snow, all at a bargain price? Read Carl Allison's post: he said it all better than I! But the real key here is that the new Urals are far & away improved over the Russian home market lot that you're probably thinking of/familiar with, simply because the U.S. importer has worked so diligently at bringing the factory up to speed. They may even [/i]just[/i] manage to get the old lumps smoothed & polished enough to convince me to buy a rig before the EPA shuts them down for excessive smog output, but it's a closely run race. I do know that they have one redeeming quality (even in the straight-up, non-sidehack version) that is sorely lacking in almost all modern Bikes, except the rumoured Guzzi CA "classique": a loooong, level, bench saddle for riding two up. These seats all seem to have worked in the 60s & 70s, then appear to have gone the way of the passenger pigeon [which is an odd choice of phrase, since almost all the 'birds' prefer them over their modern replacements for passengering duties! ] Ride on!

Well, at least he waited until after the Chunnel was built, so he could just load it onto skids & have a lorry just come pick it up & drive it to France...

Well, yeah: there is that!

Yeahbut... Reboot doesn't sell engine parts, just the whole engine! Trust me, if I had 1000quid + money for the shipping stateside, the Centauro engine they're flogging would already be mine! But as it stands, I'm not spending the dosh just to get a pair of heads off the Spot motor they've got similarly priced in order to experiment with making a set of proper bathtub heads & seeing what improvment may be had on a v11 by better combustion chamber dynamics... Can't blame Reboot, tho': they've been around long enough to know their market, so it's almost certainly more cost effective for them to sell the engine parts this way than to spend the time tearing the engines down & parting'em out...

I thought they were 6000 rounds per minute? Thread title gets a BIG bzzzt! for mixed terminology: chain guns are not Gatling guns! The different rates of fire are dependent upon how big a motor they have driving the Gat & how many barrels; clearly the 5-barrel guns are going to fire at a lower round-per-minute rate than the 10-barrel guns. Chain guns are single-barrel, with the action chain-driven by a motor. This was invented by Hughes Aviation(?) to enable the chin-turret on their Cobra? attack helicopter to function more reliably at a higher r.o.f. than a more traditional recoil-operated machinegun action can do. Already saw the cheezy exhaust toy in a thread on the LABiker listserve; as I stated there, it's wasted on a cruiser: it needs to be mounted on a sprotbike w/ underseat exhaust & have some sort of propane feed so that you can get the "font of flame" f/x that a real Gatling produces...

#1: Air-cooling. Air-cooled engines have always had lower CR's than their liquid-cooled brethren. Think about the highest CR you heard about in the SuziQ Gixxers before they moved from the air&oil-cooled SACS engine [which lives on in the Bandit] to the water-pumpers; what, 11:1 vs. nowadays, 12.5? 13:1? And those are I-4s... #2: Cylinder diameter. Let's take an example where the engines have the same stroke, to make the math easier: a 1000cc I4 has 4 cylinders of 250cc, a 1000cc V2 has 2 cyls of 500cc each; the diameter of the V2 pistons is going to be about 1.4x the diameter of the I4. That means that the timing has to have more advanced to create a complete burn at similar rpm, which means that you're that much closer to pinging. Retard the timing, pinging is less likely, but you generate more heat & less power [at least, that's my understanding of it!] #3: Hemi head. Hemi's are great when you have 4v heads w/ a central sparkplug & great intake tract design for good mixing. They bite when dealing w/ 2v heads with their offset plugs, large valves, and not-so-great intake tracts that don't flow & fill as well as they might... The dual-plugging of the latest iteration of the Guzzi big-block is just a band-aid for this antiquated hemi-head design. Ride on!

Lest we forget, this whole thread is centered upon an "article" in the Brit MCN. The 'Murrican MCN (Motorcycle Consumer News) is an entirely different kettle o' fish! It's what all the 'slicks' (4-color, glossy bike rags like Motorcyclist, Cycle World, Sprot Ryder, etc. wish they could be (in terms of journalistic integrity, writing for actual content, valid tests, etc..) when they grow up. MCN over on this side of the Pond means a black&white monthly printed on 20? 24? # stock that's supported mostly by subscriptions (so no manufacturer advertising to "skew" the test criteria!) When our MCN sez "This bike had this problem," manufacturers try really hard to solve it by the next model year.

Ouch! Talk about d@mning with faint praise! Wasn't it Shakespeare who said "comparisons are odious?" Too bad they didn't start with comparing two equivalent rides: the Tour Glide vs. a California, or a Dyna against the Breva. Choosing a cruiser "because its a cruiser, & you don't expect them to get out of their own way" vs. a bike that's better in every respect except that it's rather bland [targeting the BMW market] isn't really "fair." No dyno specs, no ETs over a set course, no nothin'. Whatever. I do kind of wonder about his complaint about the Breva having a hinge in the middle when leaned over; leads me to suspect that someone @ Piaggio didn't check the tire pressures on the test bike between taking it back from one bike rag & sending it out to MCN. He claims to be a Guzzi fan, but panning a bike just because you don't like the looks? Fine: say it's got looks that only a mother could love, but be honest about the capabilities. Makes ya wonder...

I guess I can pony up for 1@1/2rate, if only to get the prod. #s higher for everyone's benefit. A pair@1/2rate would still be better, tho'. Maybe this proposal will enable you to hit critical mass? Here's hoping!

Consensus is that Euro spec is the minimum for decent performance, w/ the Raceco specs at the upper end. Ride on!

OUCH! How much are the stock replacement gaskets? They'd have to be pretty spendy to justify even the lowest $86 quote for the permanent solution. Wish I had the money to spend on that, even just as a precaution [y'know, once I had that, the originals will never fail... ] Keep us updated if there's enough subscribers to bring the cost down further; this may really become a "critical mass" sort of thing, where once the unit cost comes down lower, more will jump on board, recursively to the point that *everyone* will buy in once the cost is down to $40 or so... Good luck!

Sounds like a keeper, Al!

Do not, I repeat, do NOT! allow whoever sold you that line of b.s. to sell you a bridge or any artifact requiring a monetary exchange. They are not trustworthy... Ride on [safely, not on retreads, colored or otherwise!]

iirc the pertinent section from Guzziology correctly [old borrowed copy, since ret'd.; have yet to purchase my own, current one], the 4v Lario smallblock had some major valve gear issues, finally corrected by properly heat-treated components [shades of the hydro- big block story, almost 20yrs later!] arriving too late to save the small blocks' rep. The Lario's also suffered from finish (paint? plastic?) issues (must be garaged or they get old fast. What bike doesn't follow this pattern to some degree or other?) If the owner can show proof that the retrofit valve parts are in there, you're in like Flynn. If not, they're going to be hard to source 20 years after they were in limited production. Beyond those caveats, the bikes were definitely good performers for their day, as others have already indicated. Unless you're fairly mechanical yourself, I'd advise extreme caution.

Mountain? Billy was a mountain... Not showing your age, Carl: you're showing your taste!

Regrettably, the 1st is my SO's & my anniversary, so I'll be MIA. Durn wimmen & their pesky sentimentality! Always ruining a day out w/ the lads...

Splendid idea, but: GM tried "dieselization" of their gasoline car engines back in the 70s after the 1st or 2nd oil crisis. They learned to start from a clean slate after numerous customers complained about the hood ["bonnet?"] blowing off their cars as the cylinder head exited the engine compartment in a rapid vertical direction... There's a company here in SoCal that's been building a diesel conversion of the Kwak'ker KLR650. They finally woke up to the fact that NA diesels don't have enough performance to use in a motorcycle, so they're working on a turbo'd version of their product right now. Unfortunately, they're targeting military sales, so the price so far is completely outrageous, w/ expectations of even more outrageous for the turbo version. If you had a spare frame & running gear laying around, buying a small diesel to put into it might be a not-entirely lunatic project. Taking perfectly good Guzzi and bodging it into something that will only be ugly & prone to rapid self-disassembly would be a crime...

The pre-muffler under the gearbox serves as a collector. Not the most efficient, but surprisingly good from some dyno charts comparing it against various aftermarket options. The Stucchi ["Stew-key"] seems to be the one to beat as far as the aftermarket options go, hence the immediate recommendation you rec'd. earlier in this thread. Don't make the mistake of calling it a catalytic converter; I did that once, & boy was I straightened out in a hurry! It doesn't help that it's where the cat should go, looks like one, & is a commonly replaced piece of kit [just as the cat is on most motorcycles that don't require annual smog checks...] The Power Commander is a popular addition, not so much for added power, as for general correction of the poor job the factory did on the stock map. [bear in mind tho', that the factory is aiming for widespread govt. approval more than performance; they figure the aftermarket will sort that part for them... ] True rwhp from a 2v v11 motor, properly kitted & tuned seems to top out around 80hp. It's possible to get higher numbers, but they reportedly come at the cost of decreased reliability. Ride on