pete roper

Mate, it's not a matter of a 'Good Catch', it's simply a case of simple experience. Probably for a lot of youse blokes Guzzis are fairly new. Thing is their *technology*, especially on the big twins, hasn't really changed since..... Nixon was President! I dunno how long Greg has been fooling with them but I'd guess that like me its probably closer to thirty years than twenty. this doesn't mean we are 'Oracles' or 'All Knowing' and God save us from being seen as 'Gurus' but it does mean that if there are long known problems of mistaken assembley or chronically recurring problems we will of stumbled across them at one point or another. This doesn't mean we'll always be *right*, or even 1/2 *right* but it's usually a good starting point for diagnosing a problem, especially if we agree Gary Cheek is also a good reference,as are many others who contribute widely on the 'Net'. If you want 'Guzzi Help' Carl Alison's wiring schematics are a godsend and Greg Bender's site is an allegorical horn of plenty of Guzzi knowledge. Periodically I troll around othe *marque* sites just to see what's going on and I find few, or more often, none, that have people who are interested in more than posturing and explaining to the world how they are the best/coolest/fastest/most hip people on the planet! Guzzisti may be an argumentative, disagreeable bunch of bastards but e tend to help each other without much fear or favor when push comes to shove. If people would try to put the cynicism on the back-burner for a while occasionally it would be a fine thing. THat will be $50.00 please Pete

Clutch springs? Apart from bikes that have been ridden thousands of miles by MORONS with slipping clutches I've never replaced them on Tonti's. It may well be a sensible precaution on something a bit more *powerfull* like a V11 and as they are cheap as chips? Why not? but even our race bike generally gets the "Oh this one looks a bit sad! Lets dig through the box of munters and see if we can find a better one!" treatment, and it only has 8 springs and produces in the mid 80's HP and buckets of torque! Pete

More experience here than I've got. Listen to Greg. Go for the Griso/Breva plates. How much saving is worth pulling the donk again???? Pete

As Greg sez, any doubt and just get new ones. I believe Greg is a great believer in the latest itteration of the factory plates? While I've never had any problems with the Surflex type I believe that the factory ones are supposed to be less harsh in their take up? WHatever, the clutch in my Griso is very nice, albeit noisy, but that's par for the course. Any significant price difference between the Factory and Surflex plates Greg? I wouldn't think so???? Pete

OK, a couple of things I can tell you straight up. 1.) It's been apart before, those are Surflex friction plates so the chances are the factory plates ripped their centres out or de-rivetted at some time in the past. 2.) Both of the friction plates should be installed with the *Raised* bit of the centre spines facing rearwards. If the front one is installed with the raised bit facing forward it will rub on the centre of the pressure plate and prevent the friction material touching the furface or clamping properly. This *may* not occur with new plates but will certainly do so as the friction material wears and this would also fit in with your symptoms. As the splined part started transmitting the clamping force rather than the friction material it would of reached a point where the torque overwhellmed the ability of the surface and force to hold it, hence the slipping feeling. I can't see for sure but are there witness marks on the centre of the pressure plate and the edge of the splined centre that corresponded with it? To me it appears there might be. Anyway, I think you've found the problem When re-assembling make sure you use the correct tool to compress the springs behind the friction plate before installing the plates and ring-gear or you WILL bend the intermediate plate and have to do it all over again! Pete

This looks like oil burn to me. Note how the rear/anti-thrust side of the piston is washed clean? This indicates to me that too muh oil is getting past the rings and burning. The burning oil creates the deposits, the washed area is where it's *spurting*, (To use the pornographic phrase.) up past the rings on the induction stroke. Causes? a.) a broken or won oil control ring on that cylinder. b.) a glazed bore caused by the use of the wrong oil or an incorrect break-in proceedure. c.) buggered valve guides, especially the inlet on that side. and yes, you'll be hearing a horrible noise. It may be detonation, (Oil polluted charge detonates real easy!) or it may be pre-ignition caused by hot spots in the carbon. Either way it needs to be addressed. Take the heads to a decent head shop and follow their advice on what needs to be rebuilt. De-Glaze the bores with 1200 wet 'n' dry but clean THOUROUGHLY afterwards with a good wash. Re-Ring it and check the gaps on the new rings. Pete

Picked up the new run of sheets yesterday. Pat, Todd, yours will be in the post today. Jim? Do you still want 10 of 'em? If so gimme a 'Hoy'. If anyone in the UK or Europe wants one I'm going over to England again in March so I can probably save people the international postage by bringing a vew over in my luggage. Pete

Hmm, yes. Nasty, gauche, overstated and ugly! (And this from a bloke who used to ride a lime green and purple hot-rod and now swans about on a Yellow Griso!) Pete

Today was one for me. First I polished off he engine prep for an old V7 Sport imported from the USA, then I put back together a Mk II LeMans I'd sold but which turned up a few problems for the new owner as a warranty job, (None of which would interest you pack of philistines ) but then at mid-day a Rosso Manello lobbed in. This is owned by an old customer who used to have a Mk V Lemans but traded up to the V11. Thinking he'd do the right thing he did the oilsand then took it to Sydney's newest Guzzi dealer. for a 'Tune Up'. He reckons they made it run 30% worse so he had a go using his not inadequate knowledge but ended up feeling he was out of his depth so he sent it to me. What a munter!!!! It hardly ran! I won't list the f@ck-ups inflicted upon it but even I, an FI *newbie* was able to get it to run pretty damn well in about 2 hours and I did it mainly by *feel*.Yes, I set it up with the Axone to the 'Factory' specs but mates! A bit more fiddling and a few minutes with a Twinmax and it's a different machine. As I say. I'm not a bloody genius, I can't see through metal or wave a magic wand, but there were so many things so *wrong* it wasn't funny! What really worries me is if some *Mechanic* can stuff-up something as simple as a V11 as badly as this how many other poorly running, if not downright UNSAFE machines are there out on the road?????? Perhaps the governments of the world are right! Perhaps we should all be forced to drive and ride at no more than 60MPH/100KPH. If the people who are maintaining the vehicles ar so bloody clueless maybe it really IS in our own best interests! Tomorrow I'll tip in a bit more time and take it on a LONG test run, (Poor me! ) through some traffic and hot stuff and have a bit more of a fiddle but it's currently pretty nice. Some days it's a real bastard being a Guzzi mechanic Pete

Unusual, but not unheard of. The fact that you're getting the pulsing feel at the lever along with the slippage tends to make me think that it is the plates un-rivetting or de-laminating. Another possibility is that one of the two friction plates has ripped it's centre out. Greg would know more accurately than me when the changes occured but there have been at least three revisions of the *late model* Guzzi plates. The very early ones used to rip their centres out with great gusto at low miles, the next generation had thicker steel centres but then the friction material started separating from the part it was riveted too and finally they started both rivetting and bonding the material to the centre! I think that's the order it was done anyway???? Although my peanut brain tends to think that all of these upgrades were made before 2000 there is no reason to belive that someone in the factory didn't find a stash of old plates up the back of the store somewhere and sent them to be put into new bikes when they ran out of the newer design! 2000 wasn't a particularly good year for Guzzi so it may well be they were scratching around for parts to push bikes out the door Pete

Art, I've recieved lots of emails from people wanting plates. I've tried to reply and then find my replies are being rejected as spam. Why this is I'm not sure but there really isn't a lot I can do about it? It's other peoples' servers that are rejecting my replies. As it is, If I can do this here without it being seen as too much of a shameless spamming excercise? My email address is motomoda_at_ optusnet.com.au There is a paypal account linked to this address. For the USA postage is about $20AU and the plates themselves are $155AU. Anybody who can't get through to me directly by email? You can contact me here via PM or via any of a number of other boards I frequent by their private messaging systems. Believe me, I DO try to respond to people! At the moment I'm just waiting for the next batch to be finished so I can pick 'em up. Helicopter Jim has asked me for 10 of 'em, five more are earmarked for MPH, Pat Hayes in CA has one paid for and on 'Back order' as it were which leaves four more up for grabs. As I've said before if people DON'T here from me or the plates don't arrive? let me know and I'll re-send another one. While I think the postal service in OZ is actually fairly reliable I have had a host of things go missing or simply not arrive in the US, dunno why, stuff seems to get to Europe OK. Pete

Ahhh. Perhaps I'd better explain the terminology. The shaft and it's universal joints are, obviously, made up of lots of different parts. In the knuckles at either end of the shaft there are a series of pieces. The bridge shaped piece that clamp either to the output shaft of the gearbox or the pinion of the bevelbox and it's companion piece that on the V11's is actually part of the shaft halves but on the earlier spine frames is another very similar or identical bit are reffered to as the 'Yokes' taking their name from their similarity to the bar that oxen have over their shoulders when towing something or the device used by happy, smiling Dutch girls in tourist brochures for carrying pails of milk about! Within this pair of parts there is the actual joint itself. These can be called by several names. The Italians call them Cardan joints, I was bought up to call the Hookes Couplings because like everything else worth knowing about they were invented by an Englishman of that name, (Not! But that's not the point ). The coupling consists of a cross shaped piece, this is the trunnion, and at the end of the arms of the trunnion there are four caps which contain needle rollers which are pressed into the yokes and retained by circlips. The needle rollers work between the cap and the trunnion to allow one yoke to move in a different plane from the other BUT as it does so, it there is only one of them there will be loadings imposed on the yokes as the combined unit turns. The needle rollers in the caps are lubricated by grease, hence the grease nipples, and this is retained in the caps by oil seals on the inner, trunnion end, of the caps. While most people when greasing the couplings simply pump grease in until it blurts out round the eals this isn't actually the way it should be done. By the time it's splurting out it's obviously buggered the seal! Grease should be added only until the seals can be seen to swell a little bit, this DOESN'T require much grease! As previously discussed, if the entire shaft arrangement is assembled correctly the change in angular velocity between the front and rear couplings will cancel each other out. If the couplings are misaligned the forces imposed will be multiplied! For this reason it is important to make sure that the trunnions line up like so +------------+ Not like so x-------------+ V11's have the paint marks to help. On earlier machines I believe one relies on the grease nipples being in line or simply guaging everything up by eye. Pete

Ahhhh!(sound of penny dropping!) No if yours is an 1100 Sport Corsa the system is different! I'd assumed that the 'Corsa' in your sig indicated 'Nero Corsa' or some such. No. The earlier, pre V11, spineframes use a different system. Your bike has the 10 spline shaft and it uses two separate paird yokes with a single trunnion in each on either end of a separate driveshaft which incorprates the sliding coupling witha a collar and spring arrangement. On those there are no marks! You just have to make sure the trunnions are aligned correctly by eye. This is most easily done wit the shaf off the bike and there is no reason why you cant put your own marks on with correcting fluid or some such fo ease of assembley on the bike. Pete

Look, just a thought, if you want improved forks surely the wreckers must be full of sets of decent Showas off Jap sportsters? Yiou they'd probably need re-springing and perhaps (?) re-valving if they came off something much lighter but Showas are a lovely fork and I'd guess have to be cheaper than something super-trick like Ohlins. Pete

Alex, on the V11's, any of their variants, if you look at the driveshaft you can see the sliding coupling just to the rear of the grease nipple on the shaft itself. This is there to allow for variations in the length of the shaft as the suspension works and as the bevelbox tries to rotate against the torsional forces imposed by the power being applied and on the over-run. On both the *front* part of the shaft and the *rear* part of the shaft on either side of the joint where the bak slides into the front there is a paint line. On asembley these two lines are supposed to point towards each other. This ensures that the trunnions at the front and rear of the shaft are working in the same plane which elliminates the torsional forces on the shaft as those iposed by the front trunnion are cancelled out by those, working in the opposite direction, of the rear trunnion. I've yet to see these paint lines washed off so they must be applied with something fairly robust and indellible. I suppose it's possible if the shaft has been pressure washed a zillion times they might wear off but that's a fairly unlikely scenario. If you don't have a paddock stand simply roll the bike forward until you can see one or both of the lines. If you can only see one on the front or back part of the shaft keep rolling until the other one appears on the other bit. If you find them both and they don't line up it's time to pull your wheel off, swing the bevelbox back until the shaft disconnects front from rear, then one of the parts of the shaft until it can be slipped back together with the lines pointing towards each other. Next time I get one in I'll take some pics if someone can post 'em up for me? Pete

I have a feeling that when they are torqued at the factory they actually over-torque them, there was a rash of broken studs a few years ago which might of been related to this but for whatever reason I've never felt it neccessary to retorque the heads on a *new* bike and certainly when you try to loosen the nuts on factory fresh heads the seem to be a damn sight tighter than 32 ft-lbs. On rebuilt motors I do as Gary and Greg. Heat cycle the engine and let it cool completely, re-torque, then repeat at first service (Approx 800km/500miles.) then forget about it until the heads come off again. Withe the *new* twin plug motors the head and base gaskets are incompressible steel rather than the earlier kingerlite type which will initially compress in service so I don't see any need to ever re-torque these. As to why do you back off the nuts before re-torquing? Sliding friction is less than static friction. Try pushing a heavy object across a floor. It needs a good shove to get it moving but then considerably less force to keep it moving. Same with nuts and bolts on or in threads. The nuts should be backed off and the threads lubricated prior to re-torquing to ensure that the nut can move freely before reaching it's torque point. The lubricant also elps overcome friction on the thrads which will interfere with the clamping force exerted by the fastener. Pete

Yup, second most venomous snake in the world, and they live in my back yard! Along with Eastern Tigers, which are the 4th most venomous! In fact Bungendore is generally ccepted as being Australia's 'Tiger snake capital' From a site I just googled up "The eastern brown snake is the second-most venomous snake in the world and, with its contentious nature, perhaps the most deadly. They are found in a wide variety of habitats in central and eastern Australia, including savanna woodlands, grasslands and arid scrublands. They mainly eat reptiles and small mammals along with the occasional bird or frog. Unlike fierce snakes (Another name for Taipans, the most deradly of all, we don't get them locally!), eastern browns can be very aggressive. They are fast moving and quick to retreat but will attack when provoked, rearing up in a distinctive "S" shape and striking repeatedly." Getting back to V11's though, Miles' bike had the shaft misaligned by about 2 splines that would be about 32 degrees which is in my book pretty much as bad as it could be. THe result of the is that as the suspension tries to move up and down the whole driveline will try and wind up and down like a great big torsion bar spring. These quite severe forced have to be dealt with somehow and the way the machine dows it is by working the cush drives excessively and in a manner they were never designed to be worked. As the forces load up the shaft it will try to twist, but can't really, so the loads will be transmitted through the teeth of the crownwheel and pinion to the rubber cush drive at the rear wheel and through the pinions of whatever gear the machine is in to the stacked washer and face-cam shock absorber on the input shaft. Neither of these devices are really designed to take these sorts of rapid loading and unloading sinusoidal forces and can't cope so the end result is that these forces decide to try and load up the suspension instead and cause the bevelbox to try and rock first one \way and then the other, forward and back, on the wheel spindle. Every action having an equal and opposite reaction this means that the forces exerted on the cush drives will also be exerted on the bevelbox torque rod. Is it any surprise that miles found that any time he went round a corner on anything other than a constant throttle and hit even the slightest ripple it got 'Kinda Squirrely' rather rapidly? What does worry me is why this is happening so much? Trunnion alignment isn't some sort of little known 'Black Art' it's really simple 1st year apprentice type stuff like understanding why tyres need air in 'em or why engines start to squeak if you don't put oil in 'em. OK, so most motorbike mechanics are dealing with chain drive bikes but there are enough shafties around that they should of been taught this stuff at tech. and *Especially* if they are dealing with something a bit obscure and oddball like Guzzi you'd expect there to be a basic understanding of the peculiarities of the marque. Anyway, it's worth checking just to make sure and if you're having your tyres fitted by a shop not used to Guzzis it's worth mentioning it to the tyre fitter. While on Gregg's bike I disconnected the torque rod bolt to get the shaft to separate with Miles' machine the box twisted on the torque rod (without the bolt being removed.) sufficiently for the shaft to separate. Since this can happen it may well do so during tyre changes and if it does then an unknowing tyre fitter may just stick it back together any-which-way not realizing the significance of the paint marks. so always check and politely inform if you think that whoever is doing the work doesn't understand. Pete

Oh, the cat's fine! Tickety-Boo! Honky Dory! Then Erika says "Do you think this looks like a bite?" She has two suspiciously close marks on her wrist, then starts feeling Dizzy!!!! ARRRGH! She's off at the hospital now, No, we don't think she's been bit, neither do the quacks! But better safe than sorry eh? Kids!? Don't bother!!!! Pete

Oh, great! I'd just written a bit of a blurb about Miles Long's driveshaft, (It was out of alignment by approx. 2 plines, 32* to my calibrated eye. Then the power crashed so I lost it and then one of our stupid F@cking cats decided it would be a *Really* bright idea to try and attack a Brown Snake in the back yard! So it's got bit, and we don't want to loose *another* one so it's off to the vet so we can kiss goodbye to $1,000 there. The town is full of bloody mental defectives because it's the Country Music Festival So I can't right now be bothered to write an analysis and rant on the problem. Once my cheque book and good humour have recovered I'll try to Pete

In my experience, which is limited to the box I took apart for the photo-essay and several others I've tightened up the castelated pinion nut on, tightening the nut does seem to reduce the side play in the pinion. Not always, but in many cases it does. I think this IS down to the bearing not being pushed fully onto it's register OR alternatively it just settling in service. It's the latteral play in the pinion that this allows that seems the most likely culprit for the hailed pinion *nose* bearing. As Andy said the wear pattern on the inner race looks as if the pinion has been pushed off it's axis which should be next to impossible unless their is excessive end float on the pinion. Probably the strangest thing is that even with quite pronounced play in the pinion the pinion teeth don't seem to suffer any damage, although it must throw out the mesh more than I would of thought was acceptable Pete

If you were going to forcibly aspirate one of the new ones I'd think the short stroke 850 would be a better bet, they're just begging for it! Pete

With all due respect I think the 1200 Sport is a horrible, ugly, bastard of a thing. and it has the downspec suspension . Griso can have hard luggage, has top of the range suspenders, can have a screen added if needs be, (I was going to but don't need it!) It's also stunning to look at whereas the Sport 1200 looks like a used condom that has been left in the sun for a week. Pete

Me old mate Kev Foote lives in WArrington, he's a dab hand with the tools but is VERY tied up with a young family at the moment, he hasn't been active on the boards for yonks now but he recently posted on WG again about our Mille GT so you could PM him there if you're lookin for help. Pete

Ratch? With the trunnions, surely the sinusoidal wave would be greatest at 45 degrees misaligned? Although having the yokes lined up *correctly* would seemingly keep things better ballanced (? Maybe not.) the crosses of the trunnions at 90 degrees would still be working together to elliminate the loadings. I could be wrong, I'm not an engineer and thinking about such things makes my brain hurt With both the 20 tooth splines used on the V11 and the 10 tooth ones on the five speed spineframes youd expect that having the shaft misaligned by 180 degrees exactly would be possible. I tend to think with the earlier, 10 spline shafts, which have separate yoke-pairs at either end clamped to the various splined bits that if one or other of these is turned through 180 degrees in relation to it's fore and aft orientation then it can be impossible to get proper alignment of the trunions as it is only two of the four yokes that are machined in such a way as to enable correct planar alignment. On the V11's the driveshaft yokes are actually part of the shaft from memory so this sort of mis-alignment isn't possible and so I'd assume that a 10 spline misalignment would cause a 180 degree difference from the painted lines which would be harmless. The only way to be absolutely sure would be to pull the shaft off, not a big job, and eyeball it closely. As I said, this is all entirely hypothetical as I'm not next to a V11 to experiment. Pete

The smallblocks only use a single trunnion at the front of the shaft, thing is they have an incredibly soft and forgiving rubber cush drive on the rear wheel, even so they are more prone to going tits than the big blocks. As for BMW using a single joint on their older models? Perhaps thats why their crappy gearboxes have to be re-bearinged every 60,000km or so. And yes, two out of alignment joints impose far greater forces than a single one, the further from correct they are the greater the problem. Yes, I too have had customers who hadn't noticed that their driveshaft was out of alignment. Universally they HAVE noticed a vast improvement when the trunnions were aligned correctly and as I said, the earlier spineframes with the ten spline shafts are more than capable of snapping the end off their pinions if the splines are out a couple of teeth. Those sorts of loadings are going to give ALL the bearings in the entire driveline a real walloping, sap power and greatly increase the risk of catastrophic failure. If it isn't important why does evey other vehicle that uses a prop shaft have the trunnions aligned!? Pete