Bit delayed on finshing the 6k saga

Kids, Gabbie is all buttoned up and ready to roll. She's got new belts, nicely adjusted valves, a Fatduc O2 manipulator thingy and a snazzy set of gold Dzus fasteners. Things have been nuts so I haven't had time to update. Will be back soon with my final-ish chapter on the 6k service. Dzus fasteners just went on yesterday....

Vertical cylinder is so much easier

Kids, if you've never done this before, start with the vertical cylinder. It's a breeze compared to the horizontal. I also got a lucky break, none of the closers needed to be swapped - so take my giddiness with a grain of salt. Anyway, let's recap - horizontal cyl done but gaps are now smaller, old belt was back on and we left things at TDC-compression.

We need to get the vertical cylinder to TDC-comp. I don't have a degree wheel, so I couldn't accurately rotate the turning tool 270 degrees like the factory manual says to do. But 270 deg is 3/4 of a circle so I eyeballed the initial position of the turning tool and spun it 3/4 of a full rotation. Then I finished it off with the old chopstick in the spark plug hole method I told you about a few posts ago. Once we are TDC on the vertical cylinder, things fall into place.

On a whim, I thought I try to slide the rockers without pulling the belt and rocker pins. OK, it wasn't a whim. I didn't relish the thought of pulling the horizontal belt to remove the vertical belt and risk the chance of inadvertently spinning a cam wheel to a point that I couldn't get it back to square one.

Pop the rocker arm clips off. Within a degree or two of TDC, you can slide the left intake rocker over. When you do that, you're in the sweet spot for the other two too. In order to move the exhaust rocker, you have to slide the right intake rocker over first as the intake rocker blocks the exhaust rocker. There ya go, no need to pull the rocker pins. Sweet, huh?

On the vertical cylinder, I needed to swap out the exhaust and left intake opener. Now as luck would have it, I used one of the shims I needed on the horizontal cylinder. No problems, one of the shims I pulled was a duplicate. Actually 2 of the shims were 3.00 mm, and I already had one so that made 3. The size I needed should have been .02 smaller for a min gap. Sanding down 0.02mm is a breeze. I didn't have a piece of glass but the thick aluminum insert on the bottom of one my wife's saucepans was pretty flat. I checked with a straight edge held perpendicularly to the surface across the whole plate. I looked for light peeking through any gaps. There was a small dip toward the center so I stayed away from that. 400 grit wet/dry sandpaper taped to the pot bottom and a squirt of WD40 got things going. I would sand in a circular motion for a bit, then rotate the shim a quarter turn. I'd go through 3 cycles of that, then check the thickness with my mic after cleaning the shim well. In about 20 minutes, I shaved off about .03mm. Good enough, popped the shim in and moved the rocker arm back.

I put the clips back in, rotated the motor one degree-ish to get it back to TDC and then measured my gaps. Got 0.11 across the board on the openers, 0.10 on the intake closers and .06 on the exhaust closer. I'm sure at 12k, I'll have some closer shims to change as I'm sure things aren't fully bedded in.

At this point, I moved the motor back to TDC-comp for the horizontal cylinder. Checked with the chopstick and timing marks. With all things aligned, I checked the horizontal gaps again. Nope, still really tight. I was going to go back to the 'net for help but did have new belts to put on so I thought I'd take care of that first. I pulled the horizontal and the vertical belt and just for kicks, measured my gaps. Guess what? They were spot on. So I put the horizontal belt on without tensioning it and checked. Guess what? Tight gaps. Thinking back to the factory manual and some videos on the 'net, valve adjusts are done with the head off the bike. Hmmm, those are checked with no belts / 0 tension. OK, I'm going with the unbelted gaps as fine and calling it good.

Changing the belts is simple since we have timing marks to go by on the ST3s. The only trick is to sliding the belt under flange on the horizontal layshaft pulley. It's kind of a feel thing. You need to kind of wiggle things to make sure the bumps of the belt slot past corresponding valley on the pulley. Once the belts are in place, double check your timing marks. I use a simple guitar tuner app (gStrings - it's free) on my android phone to check the tension. 100Hz is what I shot for. Took a handful of plucks to get a decent measure. Once I got it to 100Hz, I double checked with the 45 degree twist. I got a bit more than 45 degrees but decided not to cinch it down more. Had a belt drive Harley for a while and tensioning the drive belt was checked with a twist. I've always felt if you were going to err, err on the loose rather than tight side. I'll check the tension again in 1k miles. It's easy enough to do.

So there we have it... valves adjusted. Time to button things up. We'll talk about that adventure later.

Sorry, wound up in Monza...

No, really... I wound up in Italy. Left last Saturday, back Wednesday night and went in to the office Thursday morning. That meant the weeknights before my flight out were occupied with finding some carry on luggage, loading my iPod with a decent English-Italian translator and packing. Oh, I really did make it to Monza, but didn't see the track. Had a great dinner, that ended at 10:00... man they eat late, but dining is serious business there and with food that good, they can eat whenever they damn well please. Will try to check out the track next time along with the MV Agusta factory which is also in the area. That jaunt put me way behind in my valve adjust story so let's get to it.

When we last left, I finally got the horizontal exhaust closer off. Now that both shims from that valve are off, I need to measure them to know which size to pull out of my shim kit to give me the desired gap. The gaps I were shooting for were as follows:

Ex. Closer 0.o5 - 0.10 mm
All others 0.10 - 0.15 mm

My original closer gap on this valve measured 0.01 mm. The original closer shim was 2.967 mm, call it 2.97. I need to shrink the shim between 0.04 and 0.09 mm, so I need a new shim between 2.88 and 2.93 mm. The shims come in 0.05 mm increments, so I grabbed the 2.90 mm closer. You need a micrometer and a closer shim measuring tool (upper left "tophat" looking thing in the photo on the right) to measure these puppies. The tool fits inside closer shim, so it makes a shim sandwich. Measure the total thickness of the combined stack, then subtract 10mm to get the shim thickness. BTW, my mic measures in inches. The conversion for mm to inches is 25.4mm = 1". Good thing I paid attention that day in scientist school. I should just get a metric mic. Oh, no, I didn't have to look up the conversion. It was a minor victory that day. Can't remember Boltzmann's constant to save my life though. Good thing we're not doing 1/kT type calcs today.

The opener shim on the horizontal exhaust valve measured 2.997... call it 3.00 mm. My measured gap was 0.06mm so I need to shrink the shim by .04 to .09. New shim should be between 2.91 and 2.96 mm. I grabbed the 2.95 mm out of the box, measured it to double check and it was spot on. Let's go put these shims on the exhaust valve then move to the intake valves.

OK, here's where I considered I was not cut out for this wrenchin' stuff. Guess what kids? I got the keeper stuck again, halfway on. There she is, stuck at the top between the valve stem and closer shim. It was stuck good too. Two things were causing the problem. First off, my rocker depressor tool really wasn't that good - pipe tamper on a the end of a pocket knife. I couldn't get good purchase on the rocker arm to get a firm push. Secondly, my electrical tape wrapped hemostats couldn't grip the valve stem well enough to keep it fully "out". Those two added up to insufficient clearance of the closer shim; I couldn't get it pushed down far enough past the groove in valve stem to get the keepers positively in the groove. Time to consult the Oracles at Yahoo and here's what they had to say.


A,B,C) Pull rad, get to TDC, pull hor belt, pull oil input cap, pull rocker arm, get to the shims. Thanks Bill for validating where I'm at is the way to go. I need all the reassurance I can get.
1) Ditch the electrical tape. Great tip came in to use the plastic dip for tool handles. Cover the hemostat tips in that goop. Thanks Jack.
2) Bend the tips of the hemos at an appropriate angle so you can get it down in there. Use a propane or gas torch to heat the jaws so you can bend them in a half circle and angle them. I used a mini butane torch, bench vise and pliers. Worked great. Thanks Jack, again.
3) Get the official depressor tool or notch a screwdriver. I didn't want to wait for another shipment of goodies, so I notched a screwdriver blade AND dipped it in plasti-dip. Also tried a dipped nut driver, but didn't work as well as the notched screwdriver. Thanks Jack, thrice.
4) File the end of a popsicle stick half round, use a dab of grease and voila... keeper holder. Thanks Nick.
5) Put the keepers in the same way they came out. If you flip 'em over, things tighten up. Thanks double, Nick, and QW.

With the tips from the group, everything went off without a hitch. Well, as far as
loading the closer shims went. The pic to the left shows a keeper loaded on the popsicle stick holder, rocker arm being depressed by my notched screwdriver and the valve stem being held in place by the plati-dipped hemos. This is the horizontal left intake valve. I was depressing the rocker, and after this shot, I pushed the closer shim (shown) down past the groove. My wife slid the keeper in the groove. Closer shims might be doable with 1 person, but I didn't try.

Well, I got the shims loaded on the exhaust valve and moved to the intake. Guess what, the intake valve was so much easier. The closer spring doesn't seem to be as strong and it was no sweat to depress the rocker arm well past the valve stem groove and pull the keepers and closer shim. Putting the new closer back on was also a snap. With that, I was done with the shims on the horizontal cylinder. I put the rockers, rocker pins and clips back on and verified my gaps. Ex closer was between .05 and .10 mm and the openers and intake closer were between .10 and .15 mm. At this point, I make sure the horizontal cam belt pulley was lined up with the timing mark and put the old belt back on. I then spin the motor a few times and get it back to TDC-comp, then measure the horizontal gaps again. Guess what? They're tighter than when I started!!!! Even the right intake, which I didn't even touch. Grrrrrr.

Now I'm used to this, so I'm only mildly peeved. I looked at it this way, I put in smaller shims all the way round and there was one valve I didn't touch at all. It had to be a measurement error or something similarly goofy. Instead of dwelling on it, I decided I'd go check the vertical cylinder and after I got that sorted, I'd come back to the horizontal. Next installment will be the vert cyl story and what I found out about the horizontal. Later kids....

I'm not dead yet...

Well, it's much later than the tomorrow I promised you yesterday. As of tonight, I'm actually putting her all back together. Did I finally give up? Nope, I won. Eventually. Last weekend was an epic struggle though. Where were we? Oh yeah, we thought we were home free.

With the opener rocker pins pulled, it's as easy as the photo to the left to pull the opening rockers out. Here I'm lifting the horizontal left intake rocker. The other intake measured fine so I won't mess with it. The exhaust on this cylinder was out of whack too, so that rocker was also pulled. Just for grins, I went to see if I could slide the rockers without pulling the pins and I could with the timing belt off. I had to turn the cam wheel quite a ways, though, to get the right intake to slide over. At that point, the exhaust rocker would move. The pic above right shows the pulley timing mark at about 4:30. To get the left intake to slide over, I had to spin the pulley back to about 10:00.

To get the opener shims off, I just used my magnetic pick up tool. The closer shim ain't so easy. As a matter of fact, it was a #^$!% and a #!%!$ and !$%& to boot. Lemme put it this way, here's where I about walked away for the day. What you see at the left is the 2nd collet/half-ring/keeper. The 1st one came out fine. This one I didn't pull out all the way before I let the rocker go which pushed the closer shim back up the valve stem and pinched it in place. At this point, it was wedged pretty good. The closer shim couldn't be pulled off the valve stem, nor could I push it down to remove the keeper. Grrrrrrr. What I had to do was push down on the closer as hard as I could while grabbing the keeper with a pair of needlenose pliers. My wife then smacked down on the closer shim (in a line of action in the direction of the valve stem) with a plastic chisel like thing used for working on windshield rubber. It was in the junk drawer of my toolbox and is pretty soft plastic. That was enough to jar it loose. Sweet, closer is out now. All I have to do is measure the existing shims and go down to the right size to give me the desired gap.

You'll have to hear the rest of the horizontal exhaust valve story tomorrow. It's a school night. Mom says I gotta stop.

Rocker Pins

After consulting the Oracle at Yahoo, I decided that I'd pull the belt and pull the rocker arm pins. The belts kind of have me freaked because I could torch the timing and have valves slamming into pistons or cause global warming. I have new belts, these are 4 years old, so they need to be changed anyway. Guess I'll pull up my big boy panties and get to work.

So why are we here at this juncture? I couldn't get the rocker arm to slide over, remember? Without moving the rocker off the valve tip, ya can't swap shims. If you pull the belt(s), you can spin the cam pulley with more control than turning the engine and my be able to find the sweet spot. I pulled the rocker arm pin and got rid of rocker anyway. Let's get going on the details of today's adventure.

I popped the other 2 rocker arm clips to start with. Since I don't have to touch the right intake shims, I might have gotten away with leaving this one on, but what the hey. The motor was left in TDC-compression so it's time to pop the vertical belt cover and check marks. Below left is the vertical cylinder cam pulley. I have a mark on the pulley and an arrow on the motor and they're lined up. The dot on the layshaft pulley lines up with a line on the engine case (below, center) and the dot on the horizontal cylinder pulley lines up with its arrow (below, right). Cool, marks all around so I don't need to make my own and count teeth on the belts and such.





Pulling the horizontal belt was a little fiddly. There's a lip on the layshaft pulley you need to work around. Loosen the tensioner bolts and roll the tensioner bearing down to give you plenty o'slack. Pull the belt off the cam pulley. That'll give you plenty of play to wriggle the belt out from under the layshaft pulley lip. There ya go, horizontal belt is free.

To get to the rocker arm pins, move round to the left side of the motor. You need to remove the oil input cap, the rocker pins hide under there. Start with the oil line. I didn't, I left it for last and had to re-bolt the cap in order to keep the cap stable enough to pop the oil line bolt loose. After the oil line is off, take out the 4 outer bolts. 1 should already be loose, it held the radiator. 2 hold the horn on and the other 1 just holds the cap. After you get the bolts out, twist the cap clockwise about 20 degrees so an edge stands proud of the motor. I'm supposed to use a small rubber mallet to knock it loose but I have none. I used the handle of a large rubber mallet and hit the head of said mallet with a hammer from the right side of the motor to knock it loose. When there's about a 1/4" gap between cap and motor, it's about free enough to pull off by hand. Slides off fairly easily.


Oh, BTW, the valve covers are back on because I left Gab to fend for herself last weekend. Thought I should close up some holes lest a stray squirrel wander in and decide to nest. After you pull the cap, you can access the rocker pins. These are the 4 larger gray bores in the photo above right. The ones toward the top of the head are the opener, those underneath are the closer pins. The bores take a 5mm bolt. For about $0.47 you can get a 5mm x 40mm bolt and fender washer from your local hardware store. I love the fastener aisle in the farm and ranch store up the road from me. (Crap, just found out John Wooden passed. Great man, not so much for his basketball record but more so for his legacy as a teacher and molder of young lives. Godspeed good sir.) I was going to try and fashion a slide hammer like configuration, but in futzing with the end cap, I noticed one of the pins was out a bit so I pushed it back in. That's when I found out it wasn't a tight fit. Look below, you'll see how a little bolt and fender washer makes a workable rocker pin extractor.



When you pull the pin, make sure you catch the washers on either end of the clip (which has been removed at this point). I pushed them together at the far end of the pin a put my magnetic pick up tool on 'em to keep 'em from going anywhere dangerous. As soon as you pull the pin, the rocker comes right out. Home free now, right? Read on.... tomorrow.

Rocker arm clip and the unsliding rocker

Man, the weather has been crap this spring.

Now that I know I've got some shims to change, we have more work to do. The plan was fairly simple; 1) pull the silly clips that keep the rocker arms in their place, 2) slide rocker arms over, 3) grab shims. Well I'll tell you right now, I've hit a snag at step 2. But before we get to that, let's cover step 1.

Pulling the rocker arm clip is a legendary struggle. If you check out the youtube video from ducatitech.com which goes over a 2 valver adjust, the clip should just pop off when you slide a pick under the raised hump of the clip. Well, Desmotre fate smites us down in this regard. The washers on either end of the clip cover the hump. No gap to slide a pick or thin screwdriver or even a hair into. So I spent 4 hours trying to figure this out. No amount of turning the clip or trying to use a modified spreader from the backside or trying to grab with pliers like instruments was of ANY use. While fumbling around in my attempt to pop this off, I found that wedging something under the clip and levering will 'raise the hump'.

Now we're talking. I grabbed a small pair of pliers with padded grips to use as my lever. I first used a dental pick like instrument to slide under the hump but it wasn't strong enough to do anything. It did bend nicely though. Time to fashion another special tool. Remember my tobacco pipe tool? Well, it has a long thin pick like tool. In pipe world, it's a reamer to clean out the pipe stem and inlet to the pipe bowl. Just so you all know, I had a short lived career as a tobacconist before I embarked on an engineering career. If you ever want to know about briar, meerschaum, tamping, care and feeding of tobacco, cigars and the like, I do that too. Anyway, back to Ducati tool world, if you bend about the last 1/2" of the reamer at 90 degrees in your bench vise, it makes the perfect rocker arm clip pry. Look right... pretty slick huh?


Below are the photos showing how I pried off the left intake rocker arm clip. Rotate the clip so the hump points toward the back of the bike. Slide your lever tool between the bottom of the clip and the front edge of the head and lever. The photo on the left shows the clip in "levered" position with the hump now standing proud so you can get a suitable pick under there. The photo on the right shows pick in place. Unfortunately, this is the worthless (for this task) dental pick, but you get the idea. Oh hey, ran across another trick. I slapped my magnetic pick up tool on the clip just before prying the clip off. This kept it from flying across the garage or down into the head or into my eye.




Well, now we can move on to sliding the rocker arm over so the shims are free to be R&R'd. ST lore says to rotate the motor just to the point where the intake valves start to open and the detent is right around there which will allow the arm to slide over. 2 days of trying and I still haven't found it. There's another way to do this... attack it like the 4-valve guys do. They have to pull the rocker arm pin and remove the rocker completely. I gotta think about this one. Not whether I should, but how. I threw this rocker arm slide over maneuver out to the ST2 Owner's Group last night and the responses I have at this time says to go that route. Next post or two, we'll go over what I plan to do.

Rest of this week is supposed to rain. Good thing I did that trackday on Sunday on Gab's stablemate. It was good to get some focused riding in since I've been unable to get any local recreational or commuting riding in. Maybe I'll tell you guys about that over the next few days.

Let's check clearances

After a month, yeah, we've been at this a month... we can finally get to the valves. Before cracking open the valve covers, take time to clean things. I wiped down the motor, under the air box, the oil cooler, oil lines and anywhere I thought I'd brush up against. While crayons, bats and small children probably won't fall into your motor, grit and grime and sand and chunks o'crud will. I also wiped down the deck of my bike lift too.

I decided to start with the horizontal cylinder. The valve cover on top (intake) is straightforward. Loosen the 4 hex head bolts and pull the cover and gasket. The bottom cover (exhaust) is tricky. Tricky because there's not a lot of clearance between the bottom bolts and the extensions upon which the oil cooler mounts. I had to make a special allen wrench, just cut down the short end so it could fit in there. The other trick is the 2 tbs of oil that's under the cover. As soon as you loosen the cover, it oozes nicely down the head and onto the header pipe. The towel you notice in the photo below left is to wipe up her drool. Below middle are shots of 2 tools I've fashioned; the aforementioned shorty allen and a pipe (tobacco type) knife. The pipe tool has a tobacco tamper on one end which I wrap in electrical tape and use a closer rocker depressor.





With the covers off, we're still not ready to measure. We need to be sure the horizontal piston is at TDC compression. Pull the left side spark plugs. I pull the lefties so I can feel for the air to escape while turning the motor or I can put a chopstick in the spark plug hole and watch it move up/down as the piston does so. I use the engine turning tool. Remove the small cover on left side of the motor to expose the crank, insert the engine turning tool and align the tangs. Use a 13mm wrench to tighten the nut on the tool and you're ready to turn motor.


Tricks for finding TDC? Method 1, check the timing marks on the layshaft pulley. I didn't use method 1, but did check after I used method 3. Method 2, take a look at the flywheel mark. You need to remove the sight glass cover on the crankcase. In the top left photo above, it's the little hex headed cover above and to the right of the crank cover. Calling it a sight glass cover is not quite right as there is no glass when you pull the cork (it's not cork, either). It's just a hole and the mark on my fly wheel is about a 1/4" indentation on the outer rim. It doesn't photograph well, so I don't have a pic. This is also in line when I use method 3. OK, method 3 is the chopstick method. Turn the motor until you feel air escaping from the spark plug hole (air escaping from the hole means all the valves are closed). Then put the chopstick or similar harmless stick into the plug hole and turn the motor until the stick tops out. Be careful not to let your stick slide along the top of the piston and get wedged between the piston and inside edge of the spark plug hole. There ya go, TDC compression.

Since measuring clearances is a 2 handed operation on a lot of it, I don't have pics. The opener gap is pretty straightforward. Slide a feeler gauge between the opener rocker and the opener shim. I start small and work up one gauge at a time until I get resistance to insertion. The gap I note is the one just before the resistant one. For the closer clearance, I use the loaded gap method. Push down on the closer rocker, then measure the gap between the opener rocker and opener shim. This is my loaded gap. The closer gap is (loaded gap) - (opener gap). Write everything down and then see what needs to be dealt with. Here's how mine turned out....

Exh Open: .06mm (too tight)
Exh Load: .07mm
Exh Close: .07 - .06 = .01mm (t00 tight)

L Int Open: .05mm (too tight)
L Int Load: .08mm
L Int Close: .08 - .05 = .03mm (too tight)

R Int Open: .13mm (ok)
R Int Load: .23mm
R Int Close: .23 - .13 = .10mm (good)

Ideally, I get .10mm gaps on the intake openers /closers and exhaust openers and .o5mm on the exhaust closer. Add .05mm to the ideal for the upper end of the acceptable range. Looks like I have some shims to change. OK, that's where we'll go next time.

Teardown 2 - Radiator and Fuel Lines

Hey! I don't have to pull the fuel lines off. Just figured that out after pondering how to get them off the hard lines. We'll get to that later. Let's start with the radiator.

First things first, you'll need to drain the coolant before you pull the rad. The earth is also round (that's another obvious statement, btw). I drain the coolant into a empty distilled water jug. Here's a trick. If you open the rad cap, the coolant will flow better. That's a normal trick. The ST3 trick is if you pop open the rad cap, the coolant in the overflow tank dribbles down the tube and out the top of the open rad cap. Neat, huh? Drain the overflow tank first. I pull the overflow tube at the radiator, spill a little and point the whizzing hose into the water jug....




Not wanting a big mess on my lift or garage floor, I also put a 5 gallon bucket under the drain plug.


Oh, the reason I use a distilled water jug is to reuse the coolant. I just flushed the rad and replaced the coolant last fall. There's a whole 200 miles on this batch. Hey, I'm kind of frugal which is one of the many reasons why I'm going through all this routine maintenance crap. So, the drain plug is on the water pump cover on the left side of the bike. Grab a funnel and a water jug, put funnel in jug, jug in bucket and open the drain. Look close, my drain plug isn't standard. I stripped the bolt hole last year because I didn't notice it was cross threaded and commenced to torquing it down. Ugggh, it happens. I have a friend who has a CNC machine in his garage who re-bored and threaded the hole. It's a standard (non-metric) bolt. My Duc is custom now.


With the coolant mostly drained, time to start unleashing the hoses. This is where the mostly statement comes into play. The bottom hose on the left side will still have coolant in it. Use your catch bucket when you pull that loose. I find it easier to pull the hoses from the radiator side rather than the other end. Simply loosen the hose clamps and twist/pull on the hose. They may adhere a bit, so quite a bit of effort may be needed. It's not really a finesse move, just go after it gradually. After I pop the hoses off, I "cap" them with sandwich bags and zip-ties. This is to keep bats, dust, small rocks, crayons and the like from finding their way in and doing evil upon the motor.


The only other thing to "unhook" is the connector to the fan. It's also on the left side, the connector on mine was tucked under the frame. There's a tab you need to lift before pulling the two sides apart.



From there, you're just 3 bolts away from radiator freedom. Two are on the top left and right side. The third is on the bottom left on a bracket that ties into the motor. Pop those loose and wriggle the radiator free. I turned the freed radiator over on the bucket to drain a bit more, then bagged it in a kitchen garbage bag... you know, bats and crayons and all that running loose... and put it under one of my workbenches where it'll stay safe.


There, now that we have free access to the horizontal cylinder and belt cover, let's deal with those fuel lines that have the vertical belt cover pinned. I don't know about you guys, but sometimes when you run up against a particularly vexing problem, it pays to walk away. It's not to give up, it's to allow your head to clear and work on it in the background. My 'a-ha' moment came on my commute to work. NPR, Mike and Mike and the local modern rock station were particularly suckish that morn, so I shut the radio down and let my mind wander in between fantasizing about hood mounted bazookas on my cage that would make the commute more efficient. Anyway, it's then that I figured I didn't have to remove the fuel lines, I just needed to move them out of the way. There's plenty of slack in the lines and with the breather hose completely disconnected, plenty of free space to wriggle out between the frame tube and belt covver. Voila... see below.

Teardown 1 - Plastics and battery box

Ok, it's been a couple weeks or so. Been busy with my other life. Just life to most folk. You know, family, job, tutoring physics... normal stuff. So I've been promising to tell you all about the teardown process. I will say this, it's taken me 2 weekend afternoons to get to the point that I'm at as of 10:00 pm on May 15. The afternoons were reasonably free of interruptions. I'm just slow and I take pictures for you. There's also the meal breaks and the swapping out of DVD's and the odd diversion like moving my shop manual to a 3 ring binder which involved drilling and cutting. Ok, here goes.

You're gonna start here... bike on center stand, fully clothed. After last fall's foray into valve adjustment, I picked up the entry level bike lift from Harbor Freight. Getting the motor up in the air sure does help my back. The wheel clamp is pretty much useless, so after this photo was taken, I pulled it off.

For the most part, all you need to pull the fairings are a couple of allen wrenches. I use t-handles with ball ends. Since the bolts aren't under a lot of torque, the ball end type doesn't present much problem. I pull only the bottom and mid fairing. I leave the top fairing (nose piece) on. The dash infill panel needs to have the bottom right and bottom left bolts pulled so the left and right edges of the top fairing are free to be bent/lifted/moved a bit. That's the trick when pulling off the mid fairing. There's a bit of horsing you need to do to get it out from under the top fairing. I've been doing it this way since I've owned the beast and notice no problems. BTW, taking the mid fairings off is easier than putting them back on. I'll show you that when we put her back together.

After you strip the bodywork, this is what you're going to be staring at. There's a lot going on in there but we just need to focus on the battery box first. The connections to the battery terminals are straight forward. I have multiple ground and positive connections, so I wrote the order of placement on the heat shrink of each wire. Being a bit leisurely in my projects, I put the battery on my work bench tethered to a battery tender. With the battery out of the way, you need to deal with the ECU on the left and some other dangly bits on the right. I unbolted the ECU base plate rather than unplugging the ECU connectors. The round thingy on the right (starter motor relay) is attached to the mounting plate by a rubber connector that slips over a metal tang. The plate unbolts fairly easily, and there's a round connector on one of wires that pops off easily as well. So that takes care of the battery box area. You can now swing things out of the way and get to the horizontal belt cover (below, center). That's about all I have for the battery box. Tomorrow we'll go over pulling the radiator and disconnecting the lines that run into the gas tank. Why do I want to pull the radiator? It makes it easier to get to the horizontal valves. The oil cooler is attached to one of the horizontal valve covers... unmount that too. I tie it off with a length of wire so the oil lines aren't left to carry the weight. Oh yeah, fuel lines and such. Well, the fuel lines and breather hose are wedged between the vertical belt cover and a frame rail. Without moving them out of the way, I can't pull the vertical belt cover. Grrrrrrr, see below....

How this will go...

Today I started the teardown in order to do the 6k mile valve adjustment. It's the second time I've started this, the 1st time was last fall. I ran into a fork in the road so I turned around. I'll tell you about it later. The way this is going to go from here is a "daily" recap of this valve adjust. "Daily" means I won't be wrenching every day, but every day I wrench, I'll summarize what was done on that day. In between these valve adjust updates, I'll drop in other things I've done to Gab in the past. Might be simple things like an oil change or weird things like adding a switched fuse block in the rear of the bike for an easy tie-in spot for electronic farkles. I'll let you know what I think of the things I have to buy to keep Gabbie running or things I've grabbed out of the junk drawer when I didn't have the right tool. Best of all, I'll show you when I screw something up so you can either mock my ineptitude or avoid the pitfall yourself. That fuse block may be one of those situations.

Next update... the teardown.

Blog Prologue - Why?

Hi. I'm Rob. I like motorcycles. I like them more than puppies and kittens and sushi and the Arrhenius equation and Disneyland and pretty much everything except family and friends... none of which we'll get into here.

I have a particular bike, a 2006 Ducati ST3s, who's life needs chronicling. The reason is simple, there's a dearth of information about the maintenance and upkeep of this particular machine. Yep, that's all there is to this blog. Pretty dry stuff, huh? Unless you like motorcycles and like them in a particular way.

I've owned quite a few motorcycles in my life... from standards to cruisers to supersports to dirtbikes and hooligan bikes. From 1999 to 2008, I averaged 1 new bike purchase per year. Some years none, some years 3. This ST3 is the only one of the lot that I was extremely happy with. So it became branded as a keeper and I have kept it longer than any other motorcycle I've owned in my grown up life. She even has a name, Gabriella. I name all my street bikes, by the way, because it's easier to say "Gab needs a bath" than "The ST3s needs to be washed".

There's another thing I like... futzing around in the garage on mechanical things. The way this ties into Gab is the fact the Ducati's are perceived to be maintenance intensive. The more accurate depiction is that Ducati maintenance can be costly if you have to pay someone to do it. This was a big consideration when I bought her in '07, could I afford to keep her? It took me about 10 minutes to figure that one out. I figured I would do as much maintenance as I could figure out and time would not be a consideration.

A lot of the 'figuring out' comes from printed material and internet resources. Books, message boards, owners groups and email exchanges with other owners come in handy and get me half way there. The rest is just doing it. So I'm going to put it down in electronic form so I can refer to it and the fact that others can too is just gravy. Unless you don't like gravy. I like gravy, well, I like to make gravy but like I said earlier, that's not the point here because good gravy requires good stock and I've been known to spend a whole day making stock just to divvy up the result in 2 cup portions I freeze just for gravy making. Which reminds me... I need soup bones.