2011-09-24

3 Years with the Malaguti Spidermax 500GT



What can I say - the Spidermax is a terrific bike. She is now driven like a sports bike with RPMs in the 6000 to 7500 (rpm-max is 8000) and the scraping of the center stand in curves does not bother me anymore...
To clarify the last sentence, this only happens when the bike if fully loaded with over 160 KG (350 pound) of passengers and cargo and in certain curves, mostly left ones.
She is a little bit more thirsty after she passed the 35.000 km mark and no matter what I changed or adjusted it stays that way. But that might have something to do that I am now mostly run with 2 persons and enjoy every minute of it - it is a very small price to pay for that much more fun the Colt Conversion provides. 

Things I done within the last year:

  • Finally after one year of leaking I changed the seal from the front shock.
  • Standing all day in the sun the vinyl of my seat developed cracks and I wanted to get a leather colored replacement but with the red paint job the seat just looks better in black. I already have a meter of the same textured material lying around...
  • the parking brake still works as expected, I had one malfunction when the brake had slipped from the rest position and had moved in front of the brake lever. I wondered why the brake lever did only work after some extra force... well re-bend the brake holder and everything works well as always.
  • my paint job is holding up quite well just the main exposed parts like the top-case what is already repainted and the right backside what was not too well done in the first place and will get a re-spray in a few weeks.
  • The footrests work flawless except for one time when I nearly dropped the bike and bend the left one and had to re-bend it.
  • after one year and 12000km on the new belt I can say that the Colt Conversion with the higher RPM is quite beneficial for the belt. It is without cracks or tears and not even the outer layer of the thread between the top and bottom half of the belt shows any sign of use. So it is quite as I expected, the belt has the most stress in low RPMs when it is flapping around.
  • I learned the hard way that Piaggio has used inferior material to cover the rollers and hope that the new set will be back to the quality the factory installed set was.
  • The radio is still a lot of fun during my mountain tours and I removed the rear speakers from the top case and will connect the rear part to the Sony speakers (see the radio post).
  • until now the Spidermax was absolutely dependable but since 48500 km I see some coolant leaking out of the weep hole and the water pump seals will need to be replaced.

2 comments:

  1. hello! i'm about to buy a GT500 brend new one 2009 model zero km from someone in my country. until this month for 2 and a half years i was riding a burgman 400 k8 and i sold it after 16000 km from zero. i like the spidermax,but the question is : shoud i buy it or not ( italian vs.japonese quality ) ... i wait for an answer,thx !

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  2. If you get the Spidermax much cheaper go with it, otherwise go with the Burgman. I do not know how long you will get spare parts for the Spidermax.

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