The Mega Motor lives and breathes. Moto Guzzi LeMans thousand 1105cc race engine first start.

'The Good'... it runs, and nothing broke, nothing leaked, nothing caught fire, and it RUNS and breathes FIRE!!! 🙂 'The Bad'... it sounds a bit rough and is very difficult to adjust when you need two hands to hold the bloody twistgrip to keep it running, also I was never convinced by those light weight modern white carb' floats that i could not adjust the way I wanted so I will swap them out for some 10g black ones on metal arms so I can raise the fuel level and try to tune the carbs a bit better... also I reckon the ignition timing is a bit out but I need it to run better to be able to adjust that and need a free hand too! 'The Ugly'... I might bodge a handlebar onto that upright scaffold pole that is holding up the fuel 'I.V. drip' so that I can then put the twist grip on the handlebar on the scaffold pole and keep the Mega motor revving with one hand while I adjust with the other 😉 Oh and I think I will also fit an alternator and wire up a charging system on the Mega Motor too as no doubt the high out put dual spark (Fireblade) coils take a lot of 'juice' and running the motor just off the battery without a charging system could be adding to the reasons for misfiring! The story of the Mega Motor; I bought it from a chap who advertised it as a 'Moto Guzzi motor', I could see from the engine number prefix (VV) that it was a LeMans thousand motor but I could also see from the fact that it had twin plugged heads, that it was something more than a standard lm1000. I know that twin plugging the 'square barrel' engines is a lot more involved than doing the older round barrel motors as it involves welding up, drilling and tapping the heads in order to move an oil way. So I guessed someone had spent a lot of time or money or both on this motor. The seller told me it his close friend had ran the motor in his lemans and then taken it out of the bike and rebuilt it for a race bike he was building but sadly died before he installed the motor in the race bike. The deal was done and I took the motor home and started opening it up to see what I had bought... honestly, the more I looked the more goodness I found and i could not have been happier with the spec and quality of work! 1105cc lemans with steel liners, forged and milled high compression 95mm pistons, Carrillo rods, lightened, balanced and polished crank, ported twin plugged heads, steel helical cut timing gears, a lightened flywheel and ring gear so pretty I'd happily hang it on the wall in pride of place if it wasn't more useful hidden inside this machine, beautifully mirror polished rockers riding on Bruno Scola style needle roller bearings, I guess the tell tale was the perfect fit alloy top spacer in place of the standard wiggly spring washer. a BIG cam, can't tell what one but suspect a Dr John cam. What an amazing motor. I honestly can't think of anything else you can do to a 2v Guzzi that hasn't been done to this mega motor. All I have had to do is go through it all checking everything is right and tight and wire it up, fitted some v11 sport inlet manifolds, some nearly new 1100 sport Dellorto phm40 carbs and jetted them up with the biggest mains I had in my drawer (175s) and will probably need to go bigger, find and fit a piranha ignition box (I recognised the Piranha pick ups in the distributor), fit some 1100 sport big bore exhaust down pipes that i already had and for the test firing loosely fit some carbon fibre ART race cans to tone down the noise a little bit. (it was still WAY louder than it seems in the video as the camera was quite far from the motor, in real life it was MUCH louder than it seems in the video! :-) Having watched the video back again today (the day after the first start) it is clear it ran better before I flicked the chokes off which confirms my initial and immediate suspicion that the floats are too light and the fuel level is too low causing a lean condition, I am confident now that by swapping out the newer lighter white floats for a pair of old black 10g ones with metal arms that I can bend, I will be able to raise the fuel level and richen it up and get it running well with just carb adjustment!