Hmm. Well, the side stands on my old 850-T3 and 850-T were pretty hopeless, but the one on my '89 LeMans V was fine, never had a moment's problem with it. The one on this bike is also fine and works very well. The center stand on all of them wasn't something I really wanted to use every day for standard parking needs, so I don't really see that as a day use thing … more for parking at home and for doing maintenance. Those are the only ones I had any experience with.
Throttle action .. LOL! The old Dell'Orto VHBs had stiff springs, and of course the LeMans' big Dell'Orto 40mm pumpers needed an even bigger, heavier spring to close the slides. I recall a funny moment when I was on a long ride with a friend and he was riding my LeMans V: "I dunno," he said, "It just doesn't seem to have the performance I was thinking it ought to." "Hmm," I said, "show me how you're working the throttle." "Well, I just use it normally and wack it open to full throttle about here." He rotated the throttle grip to where he thought he had it wide open. I held the end of the throttle and said, "Take your hand off now." He did. "Now, the problem is that you haven't really gotten anywhere near full throttle. From where you stopped, which is where the accelerator pump adds a little step of resistance to the turn of the throttle, to full throttle means rotating it about another third of the way…" I said as I turned the throttle another 60 degrees." His eyes went very big. "It takes two full handfuls of turning the throttle to get it wide open… and you better have a strong forearm." He tried it and looked at my right forearm. "I see you don't need to do much working out on that arm… " He could barely hold it open for a minute. "Yeah, it take some practice but once your arm has built up a bit, it's all right," I lied. I never told him that on long trips I cranked up the friction adjustment so that I could roll the throttle around to cruising speed and it would only creep back to off. :-) The Racer throttle action is very very fast by comparison, only about 60 degrees total movement, and very light as well. I'm so used to the old heavy throttles it took me a long time to get used to it! I never had any problem with the clutches, traffic or not. What model Guzzis did/do you ride? G > On May 24, 2018, at 1:26 PM, mike wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hepco-Becker makes a center stand that can be fitted easily, any time. It's >> not expensive. But I already have a ride-on parking stand and a shop stand >> for working on the bike, why should I carry around an additional 10-12 lbs >> of center stand that I don't need? > > I've never found Guzzi side stands to be particularly reliable. The centre > stand would seem to be valuable insurance. > >> The clutch action is very smooth and predictable, and pretty darn light; a >> shorty lever is all that's needed really. (I never really found the big >> block Guzzi clutch to be that onerous, however.) > > Certainly not as bad as the throttle action but still no fun in traffic. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
