Time can be so cruel. I mean, you buy your first (any?) "proper" 'bike and you just want to spoil it like an owner spoils a puppy, just lavish it with care, attention.....LOVE! You polish that frame, you buy that smoked 'screen, those anodised brake/clutch reservoir caps, you are proud fit to burst with the "glorious" cacophony emanating from your slip-on clad Ninja 300. And fitting them is like getting that puppy up on the bed for a big ol' Sunday morning cuddle. Aaaaah, life is grand....
...only for the Earth to travel around the Sun a few times and in the cold hard light of a day 10 years hence you are left looking in horror at pictures of what you created: how could I not see what I was doing? I don't remember being blind! Did I really have such little taste? (about the trinkets, doggo's never go out of style). To be fair, manufacturers employ a lot more people and spend a shitload more money only to throw a lay down misère in the style stakes, I mean who signs off on a yellow/purple paint combo and who doesn't think a burgundy anodised chassis is going to be polarising?
But some things hold their ground in the brutal test of time and no matter how much your taste evolves they refuse to date.
One of those (little) things is a certain STM titanium clutch "cover" from way back in the day. 20 years previous when I was absolutely clueless (that hasn't changed much...) with the 916, I couldn't imagine why people wouldn't want a tinted screen, and all carbon was good carbon, but even then I thought this appealed on a different level, like a piece of minimalist mid-century Scandinavian furniture. I'm talking about the STM SDU-0180:
Yeah, it's a helluva build-up for a piece of wire ain't it?! But they're reasonably hard to find these days and folks tend to want as much again for shipping as for the price of the thing.
But I'm stoked to eventually have this lil' fella and being 100% titanium it weighs next to nuthin':
It won't work for the 799RS project because the Corse clutch locking pin needs clearance to rotate, and it won't suit the era of the 851, but it looks mighty fine on the 749R:
With that in mind, the appeal of this next will come as no surprise. I've been thinking about crankcase chain guards ('case savers) like this sort of thing:
It's pretty cheap protection against this kind of unpleasantness:
I wasn't too worried about the 749R or 851, for reasons of moderate power and replacement case availability, but the 999RS engine has mucho mumbo and the 'cases are pretty much irreplaceable.
I figured it would be verging on free if I made it myself, they're just a fairly simple bit of stainless plate, right? So I got to looking for a pattern on the 'net, which is when the project turned into Medusa's hair-do: I saw someone bending up some Titanium plate, not for a 'case saver, but it got my clockwork brain tickin' over.
Some Googles later and all sorts of tangents (holy shit, did you know Australia is wider than the moon?) I was staring at what I knew was the answer. It sure wasn't "free" but it was a quality and configuration I could only dream of, so the answer it remained:
To be honest it is fantastic value for such a strong, light and beautifully hand crafted item (complete with Ti bolts), it's just the dreaded shipping from the 'States that bloats the spend, which is absolutely not Randy's fault. Randy? Randy Martin is the artisan and super nice guy who makes these and various other incredible Titanium creations at Stradafab:
Even though I've yet to fit a chain I couldn't not fit it up for a quick look:
Do yourself a favour and check out his amazing work....I mean who doesn't need a Titanium frame, right?
I realise this is a most un-Corse-like thing, something you'd never see on a 999RS/F0....but then the life span of a set of sand cast RS/F0 'cases when rev'd to their 13,000rpm ceiling in WSBK etc was just 500km's, barely a single race weekend. This is not just a "recommendation" but scheduled in the RS workshop manual:
S stands for "Sostituzione" in Italian = change/replace in English. FYI, there is another page of engine service items and there are a lot of S's....
Ok, enough of buying other people's good shit, time to make something average myself.
I'll admit right up front this is a stoopid lil' thing, completely off the charts irrational that it offends me so much but maybe this will be therapeutic, yeah, if you're reading this "Congratulations!", you're now a therapist.
So you swap out all the plastic for carbon, you replace as much heavy metal as you possibly can with titanium and ergal, change out the aluminium steering eccentric with magnesium.....then you have to install a clunky steel steering stop. All this Colin Chapman (Lotus founder and quoter of: "For more speed add less weight") bullshit trying to make the thing lighter and you're bolting a cheap "heavy" steel doo-dad onto your expensive light doo-dad, undoing all your good (expensive!) work.
Here's the lil' bastard in-situ on the bottom triple clamp below:
As a slight aside, here is a 749RS steering stop in a great photo showing the difference between a set of S yokes and 749R yokes:
Note the simple cast lug/screw stops and one peice steel steering stem on the (greasy!) S item, while the R item is the only production Ducati to have a 2 piece steering stem with an extra alloy eccentric sleeve. The frame steering head eccentric adjusts the stem angle (rake), and the stem eccentric adjusts/restores trail, moving the stem backwards/forwards in relation to the frame. Hence the fixed stops won't work and replaceable items are needed.
Another difference, the R yokes have provision for a front steering head stand where the S and lower models do not:
The above 749RS stop looks pretty nice, but the quite different 999RS item look just as nice and is simpler to make:
Except the 999RS item won't fit the OEM 749R triples....but eventually something sorta in-between emerged from a pile of swarf. The result being:
All that effort...for 7 grams...what a plonker. What's that? Yes, I'll schedule my next session on the way out....
