No Triumph reg/recs available....

Not until 11 June, anyway.

Turns out Triumph has changed supplier of its reg/recs because the
original supplier (presumably the firm that made the one that failed
on my Street Triple) has been replaced by a company making ones "with
greater longevity" (quoth Carl Rosner).

First reaction: arse. Second reaction: well, can't ride it until
weekend after next anyway. Third reaction: Triumph don't **** about if
you mess up as a supplier, do they?

 

They fucked around for long enough with the shite sprags in the early
90s.

 

I know I shouldn't do this but you were the first to take the piss
when my reg/rec packed up so...

The Yamaha dealer I dumped my bike with contacted the European
distributor on a Tuesday morning and by the Thursday afternoon the
bike had a new wiring harness and a new reg/rec. I'm not sure that
having a big pile of parts to replace known problems is a good thing
or not.

 

In fairness to Triumph, it was something that just didn't show up in
testing and only came to light after a while when batteries got low
and the engine 'kicked back'. Kawasaki's Z/GPz/GT650/750 series
suffered from a similar problem.

It's odd how faults completely escape product testing and only show up
once the end user has got his/her mitts on the thing. I remember
reading that the Peugeot 309 (I had one - horrible thing) suffered
from a rash of tailgate window fall-outs and breakages and they
couldn't figure out why, because some testing robot had successfully
opened and closed the hatch a zillion times, or whatever.

It turned out that they broke because people were parking the cars,
opening the tailgate, slinging their stuff into the back, and then
closing the hatch with one hand (on the side of the tailgate) as they
walked back to the driver's door. This caused a slight twist in the
structure and was enough to cause the glass to pop out from time to
time.

Basically, the consumer will always find a way of breaking something
that the factory hasn't thought of.

 

Just the opposite according to an old family friend who was a Triumph
test rider in the early 90s. They knew the sprags were borderline very
early on, & put one of their own engineers in the supplier's factory to
do QC. But the only real solution was a bigger sprag, & there wasn't
enough clearance to fit one, so had to redesign the cases. The interim
solution for bikes that failed was for the dealer to take a die grinder
to the cases to make room for the bigger sprag. Mine had this done[1] &
has been fine ever since.

[1] At Triumph's expense, after much letter writing on my part. This
was in the late 90s & they still refused to accept it was a common
problem.

 

Ah, that's interesting. Never heard that before.