last monday, myself & 3 other owners of old guzzis set off for the 85th anniversary bash at the moto guzzi factory in mandello del lario on the shore of lake como in italy.
that's dave, me, jessie & "evil" dave L to R.
no, i don't know why he's called evil, or dave for that matter. his real name is stuart
a bit of background:
dave & evil's bikes are early 70's guzzi 850 eldorados, jessie's is a 70 ambassadeur with an 850 conversion and mine is a 77 convert, which for those that don't know has a 2 speed gearbox & a torque converter like an automatic car, but the gears are changed manually. in practice you only ever usually use 2nd. hand clutch is used when you do have to shift gears or when manhandling the bike backwards, otherwise it's "twist n' go"
jessie came over the day before for me to "balance his carbs". it was misfiring badly which i eventually traced to a duff condenser. robbed one off a spare convert engine i have lying around & it was running fine. in all the years i've been messing with old bikes this was only the second one i've ever had to change.
evil dave's bike has shagged cylinders, a common malady on old chrome bored guzzis. he's too skint to get them changed so decides to go as is. over 70 mph it starts to blow enough oil out the crankcase breather to cover anyone riding behind.
dave's eldo would not get into 5th gear a couple of weeks back, so i had a look at it. after test riding it for a while, i began to get top occasionally, then it engaged every time.
i drained the oil & there was metal in it
i concluded that something had broken off somewhere & blocked gear selection, then fallen into the bottom of the box. quite a leap there i grant you, but i didn't have time to rebuild it & he didn't want to spend the money.
my own convert, i only bought this year. despite doing about 1000 trouble free miles on it since fitting new barrels/pistons after purchase, i'd only ever ridden it 40 miles in one go & only once in the rain.
shortly before leaving, i decided i should replace the ATF hydraulic lines as they looked knackered, this ended with a snapped spigot on the oil cooler
i soldered it up myself as there are no new ones available.
gotta like a challenge
set off to the chunnel and first time the tools came out was when leaving clacket lane services we found jessie had a puncture
fortunately someone had the necessary to fix it
40 minutes total including wheel in and out. not bad considering i've not changed a tyre in 15 years
evil also found that the bottle of fuel additive he was carrying for dave in his pannier had leaked contaminating his toothbrush
AFAIK he never bought another. Yeauch!
crossed channel, overnighted in a Formule 1 in cambrai. i can say i'd have to be pretty fecking desperate to stay in one of them again. no en suite but a sink. certainly wouldn't brush my teeth in there
room smelt badly of fags and the pillow was so rank i went & got the sheepskin off the bike & kipped on that
lunch stop next day
jessie's "snuffbox" light switch had seized so i bypassed it in the headlight shell. sadly the poor connection in there defied my best efforts & had to be repeatedly twiddled throughout the week
stayed the next night in a much nicer hotel in colmar and then it was through a bit of germany & on to switzerland
got to be one of the best countries anywhere for a scenic potter. the boys thought they were racing along at 80mph, gps told a rather different story: 65mph
spurning the easy st. bernard route over the alps, we went via the hardcore splugen pass. much narrower & some sections unsurfaced. i've done the italian side in the past, but the swiss side was all new to me.
going up here was the first time i'd dropped down out of second . i reckon i could have made it in top, but mechnical sympthy was nagging at me
into italy
jessie remarked that the summit looked like mongolia. neither of us have been there, but he might well be right.
rode on to our borrowed from a friend villa in bellaggio, just across the lake from mandello
fabulous food in italy, check out this pizza €5.50
one cappuccino & jessie's gone native
we now found dave's bike really did not like starting after being left out in the cold & wet. it seems the ancient amal carbs fitted would not supply a rich enough mixture by tickling the float bowls & there is no choke. he flattened the battery on our first morning in bellaggio and we took the bike to the local garage to get it charged up. meanwhile he rode pillion on the convert to mandello where bought new HT bits from agostinis & then went to the factory.
guzzi's dakar bike. wonder if it finished
baja
brand new police convert.
bol d'or bike. looks like an old eldo loopframe. scary
the V8 500 GP bike
fancy balancing 8 dellortos?
GT850 cali. i owned & restored one of these a few years back
dave contemplates the perks of joining the caribinieri
lovely bikes, shit photo (most of these pics were taken on my phone).
ferries save a lot of riding round the lake perimiter
some oddities. a guzzi powered boat
the mule vehicle that the too many say provided the engine for the bikes. it didn't BTW, there are no interchangable parts
TKCs pah! get the optional tracks on this baby
drone (i hope) engine
i really need these for my garden
some nice bikes found parked up
and some weird ones
guzzi bobber
guzzi engined harley
V7 and airstream inspired sidecar
dustbin faired le mans
sunday morning we set off home. weather damp but cleared nicely by the time we reached the gottard pass. evil checks his oil, never a good idea to do it on the side stand as it runs out the filler
on the other side we came across the
1200 owners club out on a run
later in the day it pissed down so heavily we had to abandon our target of troyes & stay just inside france at pontarlier. we were pretty soaked, my rukka had not leaked, but my couriers & alledgedly waterproof Rider gloves were sopping.
set off next morning in light drizzle. i cannot recommend this bit of road highly enough. even though it was raining, riding through the twisty gorge road was stunning with huge rock walls, a big river in flood and wispy mist clinging to the oddly shaped mountains. it was pretty spooky, i could almost belive dinosaurs still roamed in the lower reaches somewhere
somewhere after bescancon, evil dropped off the pack. bike cut out while riding & had blown a fuse. he'd replaced that by the time i went back & it still would not go at all, i traced it to yet another condenser failure. lucky jessie had bought a spare at agostinis in mandello
mixture of sun & REALLY heavy rain all the way back to the tunnel. dave & i were supposed to go LD lines from le havre to portsmouth but it goes at 5:00pm, we'd never make it so we went with the others to calais for the chunnel. this was partly 'cos he didn't want another marginal morning start after a night in a hotel.
allowed myself a wry smile when the boys got excited on the train 'cos they'd made it home
petrol stop at maidenhead & evil's bike won't turn over so he goes to bump it. "be alright as long as the generator light's not on" i say. bike starts & genny light is on like a beacon, could be seen for miles, evil's "not noticed it"
dynamo v belt has snapped. i'm about to get a temporary one from the garage when evil fecks off, then the others go too.
they seem surprised i find them again at clackett lane. obviously i would be checking the hard shoulder & services.
evil's battery now completely dead & they are about to phone recovery. i get his battery swopped with jessies (after all he barely needs it, he has no lights at all now). meanwhile dave has replaced a busted rear light bulb on his own bike and it no longer works. i don't know whether to laugh or cry.
jessie rode from the tunnel to bournemouth with no lights.
evil needed to run with as little draw as possible on his non charging battery, so went for the 1150GS look on his bike.
also a bottle of oil has come undone in his pannier & has been dripping out for the last 300 miles or so
happy to report i never laid a spanner on my convert while we were away, just topped the oil up 1/4 litre or so in 1900 miles.
there does apear to be a weep from the RH head gasket though. bit of a pisser as i am pretty stringent about torquing them down properly (not the skimpy job that guzzi recommend). only takes an hour or so to change it anyway.
still, all bikes are running and miraculously they all made it back to bournemouth. job done
that's dave, me, jessie & "evil" dave L to R.
no, i don't know why he's called evil, or dave for that matter. his real name is stuart
a bit of background:
dave & evil's bikes are early 70's guzzi 850 eldorados, jessie's is a 70 ambassadeur with an 850 conversion and mine is a 77 convert, which for those that don't know has a 2 speed gearbox & a torque converter like an automatic car, but the gears are changed manually. in practice you only ever usually use 2nd. hand clutch is used when you do have to shift gears or when manhandling the bike backwards, otherwise it's "twist n' go"
jessie came over the day before for me to "balance his carbs". it was misfiring badly which i eventually traced to a duff condenser. robbed one off a spare convert engine i have lying around & it was running fine. in all the years i've been messing with old bikes this was only the second one i've ever had to change.
evil dave's bike has shagged cylinders, a common malady on old chrome bored guzzis. he's too skint to get them changed so decides to go as is. over 70 mph it starts to blow enough oil out the crankcase breather to cover anyone riding behind.
dave's eldo would not get into 5th gear a couple of weeks back, so i had a look at it. after test riding it for a while, i began to get top occasionally, then it engaged every time.
i drained the oil & there was metal in it
i concluded that something had broken off somewhere & blocked gear selection, then fallen into the bottom of the box. quite a leap there i grant you, but i didn't have time to rebuild it & he didn't want to spend the money.
my own convert, i only bought this year. despite doing about 1000 trouble free miles on it since fitting new barrels/pistons after purchase, i'd only ever ridden it 40 miles in one go & only once in the rain.
shortly before leaving, i decided i should replace the ATF hydraulic lines as they looked knackered, this ended with a snapped spigot on the oil cooler
i soldered it up myself as there are no new ones available.
gotta like a challenge
set off to the chunnel and first time the tools came out was when leaving clacket lane services we found jessie had a puncture
fortunately someone had the necessary to fix it
40 minutes total including wheel in and out. not bad considering i've not changed a tyre in 15 years
evil also found that the bottle of fuel additive he was carrying for dave in his pannier had leaked contaminating his toothbrush
AFAIK he never bought another. Yeauch!
crossed channel, overnighted in a Formule 1 in cambrai. i can say i'd have to be pretty fecking desperate to stay in one of them again. no en suite but a sink. certainly wouldn't brush my teeth in there
room smelt badly of fags and the pillow was so rank i went & got the sheepskin off the bike & kipped on that
lunch stop next day
jessie's "snuffbox" light switch had seized so i bypassed it in the headlight shell. sadly the poor connection in there defied my best efforts & had to be repeatedly twiddled throughout the week
stayed the next night in a much nicer hotel in colmar and then it was through a bit of germany & on to switzerland
got to be one of the best countries anywhere for a scenic potter. the boys thought they were racing along at 80mph, gps told a rather different story: 65mph
spurning the easy st. bernard route over the alps, we went via the hardcore splugen pass. much narrower & some sections unsurfaced. i've done the italian side in the past, but the swiss side was all new to me.
going up here was the first time i'd dropped down out of second . i reckon i could have made it in top, but mechnical sympthy was nagging at me
into italy
jessie remarked that the summit looked like mongolia. neither of us have been there, but he might well be right.
rode on to our borrowed from a friend villa in bellaggio, just across the lake from mandello
fabulous food in italy, check out this pizza €5.50
one cappuccino & jessie's gone native
we now found dave's bike really did not like starting after being left out in the cold & wet. it seems the ancient amal carbs fitted would not supply a rich enough mixture by tickling the float bowls & there is no choke. he flattened the battery on our first morning in bellaggio and we took the bike to the local garage to get it charged up. meanwhile he rode pillion on the convert to mandello where bought new HT bits from agostinis & then went to the factory.
guzzi's dakar bike. wonder if it finished
baja
brand new police convert.
bol d'or bike. looks like an old eldo loopframe. scary
the V8 500 GP bike
fancy balancing 8 dellortos?
GT850 cali. i owned & restored one of these a few years back
dave contemplates the perks of joining the caribinieri
lovely bikes, shit photo (most of these pics were taken on my phone).
ferries save a lot of riding round the lake perimiter
some oddities. a guzzi powered boat
the mule vehicle that the too many say provided the engine for the bikes. it didn't BTW, there are no interchangable parts
TKCs pah! get the optional tracks on this baby
drone (i hope) engine
i really need these for my garden
some nice bikes found parked up
and some weird ones
guzzi bobber
guzzi engined harley
V7 and airstream inspired sidecar
dustbin faired le mans
sunday morning we set off home. weather damp but cleared nicely by the time we reached the gottard pass. evil checks his oil, never a good idea to do it on the side stand as it runs out the filler
on the other side we came across the
1200 owners club out on a run
later in the day it pissed down so heavily we had to abandon our target of troyes & stay just inside france at pontarlier. we were pretty soaked, my rukka had not leaked, but my couriers & alledgedly waterproof Rider gloves were sopping.
set off next morning in light drizzle. i cannot recommend this bit of road highly enough. even though it was raining, riding through the twisty gorge road was stunning with huge rock walls, a big river in flood and wispy mist clinging to the oddly shaped mountains. it was pretty spooky, i could almost belive dinosaurs still roamed in the lower reaches somewhere
somewhere after bescancon, evil dropped off the pack. bike cut out while riding & had blown a fuse. he'd replaced that by the time i went back & it still would not go at all, i traced it to yet another condenser failure. lucky jessie had bought a spare at agostinis in mandello
mixture of sun & REALLY heavy rain all the way back to the tunnel. dave & i were supposed to go LD lines from le havre to portsmouth but it goes at 5:00pm, we'd never make it so we went with the others to calais for the chunnel. this was partly 'cos he didn't want another marginal morning start after a night in a hotel.
allowed myself a wry smile when the boys got excited on the train 'cos they'd made it home
petrol stop at maidenhead & evil's bike won't turn over so he goes to bump it. "be alright as long as the generator light's not on" i say. bike starts & genny light is on like a beacon, could be seen for miles, evil's "not noticed it"
dynamo v belt has snapped. i'm about to get a temporary one from the garage when evil fecks off, then the others go too.
they seem surprised i find them again at clackett lane. obviously i would be checking the hard shoulder & services.
evil's battery now completely dead & they are about to phone recovery. i get his battery swopped with jessies (after all he barely needs it, he has no lights at all now). meanwhile dave has replaced a busted rear light bulb on his own bike and it no longer works. i don't know whether to laugh or cry.
jessie rode from the tunnel to bournemouth with no lights.
evil needed to run with as little draw as possible on his non charging battery, so went for the 1150GS look on his bike.
also a bottle of oil has come undone in his pannier & has been dripping out for the last 300 miles or so
happy to report i never laid a spanner on my convert while we were away, just topped the oil up 1/4 litre or so in 1900 miles.
there does apear to be a weep from the RH head gasket though. bit of a pisser as i am pretty stringent about torquing them down properly (not the skimpy job that guzzi recommend). only takes an hour or so to change it anyway.
still, all bikes are running and miraculously they all made it back to bournemouth. job done
