I thought some of you V7 owners might be interested in this, a couple of months back I found the return throttle cable on my 3 YO V7 had parted company, the inner cable was in 3 pieces.
I ran for several months with just the pull cable while I waited for Piaggio to send replacements. Today I dissected the cable to see what had happened
Click on the pictures to zoom in.
You can see that the inner cable has rusted through, there was a piece in the middle missing This would have been in the low spot under the tank.
At first I thought this had happened because the cable had never been lubed.
I stripped the plastic off the outer and cut it into pieces with my Dremel. You can see that the whole missing section of inner cable is in really rough shape.
What you can't see is the inner core was covered by a very thin plastic sleeve (not teflon, it has a really low melting point), it appears that the moisture got inside this sleeve and rusted the steel wire away.
I lubed the heck out of the replacement cables they had no lube either, I suspect the thin plastic sleeve is supposed to take place of lube.
Although I ran oil through the length of the cable I suspect the oil will not contact the inner steel wire, it would end up between the plastic sleeve and the outer cable, the inner cable would still rust.
In hind sight I think I should have removed a short section of the plastic sleeve to allow the oil to enter the inner core thus protecting the steel wire.
