Coming clean

In “Moto Guzzi the Good, the Bad, and the

Ugly Truth” in OBA 90, I listed a number of Quality Control problems encountered, the most serious being oil leaks and head gasket failure due to distortion of the bores and heads from incorrect torquing-down at the factory. I received the following feedback from Barry Jones of Italian Motorcycle Engineering:

“Guzzi engines are bedded in on the dyno for half an hour before installation but the heads were not re-tensioned at the factory. This was the responsibility of the seller. Re-tensioning of the heads on all Guzzi models on pre-delivery was essential. It sounds like yours weren’t.”

Here I think that Barry has put his finger on the likely source of the V50 Mk III’s head gasket failure problem. My V50 Mk III was a private direct import from the manufacturer, not bought from a retailer or wholesaler, therefore in the case of my bike, the responsibility for cylinder head re-tensioning lay with SEIMM Moto Guzzi. This explains why the dealer in Melbourne, appointed by Moto Guzzi to look after servicing and warranty claims, stated that the cylinder heads were not torqued-down properly at the factory, because the normally imported bikes were done by themselves, and this one had not been done by them, so in their view responsibility for this neglect lay with the factory, not with themselves.

Meanwhile it seems that the factory believed that the re-tensioning of cylinder heads was the responsibility of the seller, forgetting that they themselves were the seller in the case of the small number of bikes they exported directly to private individuals overseas. So, it seems that this ‘Quality Control’ issue, was actually one of miscommunication of corporate responsibility for Quality, and not a failure of the quality of the engineering involved. Rob Carmichael Melbourne