It’s been a couple years since I resurrected my 1988 Ducati Paso. In hindsight, I think I bought the Paso to rationalize putting off rehabilitating a 1984 Laverda RGS 1000 I’d bought two years earlier. Through nobody’s fault but my own, the Colorado Laverda (its former home and my second RGS) had become a thorn in my side, a bike that made me wince every time I looked at it.
It was late November when I towed the RGS from Colorado home to Kansas. It hadn’t run in four or five years, and with winter setting in I knew I wasn’t going to get anything meaningful done on it until early spring, so I rolled it into the unheated half of the hovel. The first weekend of February marks the annual Santa Fe Trail AMCA vintage show here in eastern Kansas. European bikes were the feature category that year, so I gave the RGS a spit shine, rolled it onto my open single-rail trailer and hauled it over. Running or not, it looked great and took 3rd Place in European Street. Fun.
During the show it snowed — a brief flurry, over almost as soon as it began, hardly worth noting. Yet Midwesterners have an irrational fear of snow I don’t understand, a panic that even a mild dusting will trap us in our homes and bring civilization to a halt. I used to spend a lot of winters in Upstate New York, where two feet of snow is meh, and life pretty much goes on as normal. In Kansas, two inches closes all the schools, and everyone shows up to work late. And at the slightest threat of snow, the city sends its salt trucks out, soaking the streets in brine. Inexplicably forgetting this, I loaded the RGS up after the show, took it home, and rolled it back into the hovel.
Three weeks later, I was ready to take stock of the RGS. Pulling it out into the daylight I had a visual stutter. What the hell was I looking at? Where was the nice RGS I’d stashed away just a few weeks before, because this sure wasn’t it. Rust and oxidation were blooming on every exposed piece of metal. The aluminum cylinder barrels and engine cases wore a dusty, ghostly gray layer of decomposing metal; the steel brake rotors were crusty brown; and brown streaks of rust traced the frame, painfully testifying to any spot where the paint had been chipped or worn off. It was 40 degrees when I brought the RGS home, almost balmy for February. The streets were a little wet, but… This was my comeuppance for not paying attention.
I spent hours cleaning the RGS, scrubbing the frame and engine in a long shot hope of staving off the inevitable, but the damage was done. Any thoughts of a simple recommissioning — my original plan — were trashed. And so was my motivation. Guilt drove me to at least make sure it ran, so I launched into a comprehensive rebuild of its three carburetors and changed the oil. It fired on the button and ran beautifully. Relief. My motivation somewhat restored, I started making plans to dig into it, but my attention got diverted when the Paso came along, and again when I lucked into the bits to bring my ’83 RGS to Executive status.
Last November, six years after I’d bought it, I finally tore into the Colorado Laverda, stripping it bare. I media-blasted and powder-coated the frame, rebuilt the hydraulics, refinished the brake rotors, replaced two worn-out, now almost unobtainium and really pricey engine mounts, installed new tires, etc. The list goes on. As it always does. The lovely red paint is as bought, and certainly a redo. The front fork had been rebuilt, wearing what look like new tubes, the legs dressed in clean, gloss black powder coat. Unlike other “repairs” on the RGS, it appears expertly done.
The folder of old Laverda ads and brochures that came with the bike suggest the previous owner was proud of his RGS, but his maintenance practices were sloppy, the bike littered with missing or wrong-sized and mismatched screws/bolts/nuts/washers. The shift rod linkage had been rethreaded from 6mm to 1/4in U.S. to fit UNC thread heim joints (why?), and the shouldered right side rear wheel bearing spacer was installed backwards. The seat stops were crude homemade replacements with exposed fastener heads that dug into the frame every time the seat was removed or replaced, and the almost-cut-through instrument cluster wiring ribbon was glued and zip-tied to the broken connector block on the cluster. The mufflers had been repaired — poorly — with globs of weld at the joints for the bends, then painted black to hide the bodge.
Given all that, I was more than a little amazed that outside of the carb overhaul, the engine has only required basic maintenance: new spark plugs, air filter, checking valve lash, and adjusting the cam and primary chains. It runs and rides beautifully. I was lucky this time. Ride Safe.