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.