With just over 82,000 miles on the Caponord, the dashboard died. Yes, while about to set off from a rather innocuous little shop car park on a hot and humid afternoon, the dashboard shuffled off its mortal coil … Curled up its toes, bought the farm – as dead as the proverbial Dodo.
On the way home I mulled over the possible cause, was it the additional microcontroller/hardware I added in 2013 or simply a failure of some part of the original Magneti Marelli circuit board? By the time I got home, I had a few possibilities rolling around my head, but nothing concrete. 15 minutes after cutting the ignition, the dashboard was on the test-bench.
Ultimately the fault was traced to a ‘Via’, a hole where a signal/power track passes from one side of the board to the other. In this case, where there should have been 12 Volts, there was 2 Volts! A simple wire link bypassed the problem and the dashboard popped back into life.
So is it a design flaw or manufacturing defect? I’d say probably a bit of both! Below is a photograph of the faulty area on a Mk1 and Mk2 board. Notice the Mk2 (right hand) has a much larger track area AND has 4 Via’s instead of the Mk1’s single Via bringing power from the top of the board to the underside. All well and good BUT both boards still only have a single Via (red dot) to pass power to the regulator on the front ……….. And it’s this Via that failed!
It seems that this was known to be a troubled area and was re-designed …. sort of. But the fact that the last Via was never upgraded, simply left this as the weak link – unfortunately, one of many on these boards!
Anyway, this one’s a runner for now ……. and that’s a jolly good excuse for a run around for an hour or two to thoroughly test it out! 😀
The Capo and I just returned from the last UK-Italy round trip for this year … as seems the norm, the trip was uneventful and the Capo ran fantastic as always. Just before I left the UK, she had a new MOT – no advisories and good for another 12 months. 48hrs later, she rolled into the barn with the odometer reading 80,892 miles and 37c on the air temp gauge – hot, hot, hot!
A good few year back when I had a Triumph Trophy 1200, I had an issue of excessive noise from the chain/sprockets – especially on the over-run. They were almost new and as far as I could tell, it was correctly tensioned. It drove me mad for a week or so, until I decided to try changing out the front sprocket, why I can’t remember, but it worked.
The only difference I could think of is the make of sprocket. I’ve always used 
Secondly, and I don’t mind admitting when a change to the Capo doesn’t work – I’ve gone back to the #60 clutch oil jet from the #40. Why? Simply because the benefits were outweighed by the losses …… yes the #40 jet made the initial 1st gear selection go from ‘CLONK’ to ‘clonk’ but it also buggered up all subsequent gear changes, gone was the silky smooth shift that I’d had with the #60 jet. In the end I would say that if your Capo shifts gears smoothly and doesn’t have an issue selecting Neutral, then leave well alone. I’m sure for those with no jet, a blocked jet or a nasty gear shift this may well be a worthwhile modification, for me I’m glad to have the old slick-shift gearbox back again.
And lastly, the replacement rear sprocket and 
Well yesterdays arrival of a spanking pair of Michelin Anakee 3’s makes the total number of tyre types fitted to the Capo a head spinning …… 5. The OEM fit Tourance, oodles of TKC80’s and Karoo 3’s and one fantastic set of Anakee 2’s. They were by far the best with excellent grip and long life – so the Anakee 3’s have a hard act to follow, I wonder how they’ll compare.
What’s the difference? One is blue and one is red …….. but it goes a bit deeper than that! I must admit that the heady and scintillating world of antifreeze has past me by for most of my adult life, my knowledge pretty much stopped at – it’s green (mostly) and it stops my engine exploding into an ice block during winter-woolly-wearing time. Oh no, it seems that is most definitely NOT the end of it, our aqueous boffins have been brewing up a positive Smörgåsbord of antifreeze variants and as you can guess only some are suitable for our precious two-wheel companions. If you want to fry your brain with 