Reliable

[grog]

Mates 17k old MT10 cracked a water pipe under front of motor yesterday. Apparently very common. Absolute mongrel job to change, exhaust headers,oil cooler off. Sort of makes our bikes look a bit more reliable. Lucky we saw coolant on floor, a long ride and it happened, good bye motor or at least stuck in a bad place.

[seth]

I've never liked watercooled motors due to the extra complications of the water cooling system and all the extra work because of that.

[grog]

Totally agree Seth unless it was old GT750, they were worth it. 😎

[gsxbarmy]

Can't really see there is any real difference between a water cooled and oil cooled engine in terms of working on them personally - you still have to take off the damn great cooler at the front whatever you do!

[DP1400]

Totally agree Seth unless it was old GT750, they were worth it. 😎

Yes, the GT750 was worth the water cooling - unless you happened to knock the all too delicate pipe brazed to the top of the rad when removing or replacing the radiator! Given its delicate nature and difficult design angle to replicate and braze, it was an absolute nightmare and `achilles heel` to the entire cooling system.......a new rad wasn`t cheap. Luckily I knew a guy who was skillfull enough to repair mine!

[Batkwaka]

Water Jackets also aid noise reduction which has become more difficult with increased horsepower from engines.

[grog]

Just wondering what bike you blokes rate as your most unreliable owned. Ive had about 50 or so. All have been pretty good, one exception. Norton Commando 850. Fix one thing, something else broke the next day. I kept trying with it, thought it must eventually run out of problems. It never did. Wasnt an old clunker, less than a year old when bought. I was actually going to set fire to it at one stage. So much money and time spent.

[Mick_J]

I've had around 50-60 bikes and all have been fine really, there have been breakdowns but isolated with one exception, my 72 BSA A65 lightning let me down quite a bit.  I have only had to call out a breakdown truck twice, one for the 14 when the fuel pump separated in the tank and once when the alarm fob lost it's code on my Speed Triple.

[DP1400]

I`ve probably been lucky. Only one machine I`ve owned, (of which there have been dozens), was unreliable. Don`t laugh.........an orange Honda PC50 !

I bought it as a `ride to work` tiddler when I owned my Z1. I simply didn`t want to ruin the `Z`, riding in all weathers the 10, miles to work and back. Trouble was, i`d more or less suffer a coronary starting the effing thing, much to the amusement of my wife and workmates!

Having decided enough was enough, I left it down the road one night and sure enough, it had been nicked by the morning. Its a wonder the idiot didn`t return it to where he`d found it, it was that difficult to get going!

Being a glutton for punishment, I bought another one. Blue this time. Big money too - £25.00, this was in 1978. The trouble with this one was, it was so reliable that on a monthly basis i`d forget to refuel it and end up pushing the bu88er home

One winters evening my neighbour asked if he could borrow it in order that he could visit his wife in hospital (he had no car), so off he went. Somewhere near to a village called Roade in Northants he ploughed through a snowdrift on it, into a ditch, left it there and hitched a lift! I never did bother going to retrieve it!!

All absolutely true.