My travel arrangements for getting home from work went something like this:
Chopper to Dili, Timor Leste
Fixed wing flight to Darwin
Red eye flight to Sydney
Connecting flight to Wellington, NZ
Bus from airport to train station
Train out of Wellington to my nearest country station
Bus to my small country town
- Where my good lady would finally pick up my sorry arse and drag me home
So I was usually feeling pretty ordinary by the time I got home and reached for a "thank fuck that's over" beer. But one trip I staggered in to find a package waiting for me...a fairly large package....that weighed 3/5ths of bugger all....that bloody airbox! 4 months late! I couldn't believe it, I was sure some kid in Bangalore had figured out a way fit it to his/her Royal Enfield.
Don't worry, I made a point of contacting the seller and refunding his refund, treat people as you'd like to be treated I reckon.
But what to do about the donk? The ol' girl was starting to look like mutton dressed as lamb, all gussied up with a few bits of go-fast-finery, only to have a saggy ol' 90hp 851 underneath it all.
The trouble is the early desmoquattro's were renowned for being fragile when rev'd hard. Realistically they were only an evolution of the old Pantah donk which no-one had ever envisaged making 100+ hp or sustaining 5 digit rpm's. Cracked crank cases were par for the course back in the day, mainly due to the "stressed member" engine being....er, stressed. Apparently Raymond Roche used 36 engines on the way to the 1990 WSB title.
Inspiration came in the form of some online chat about Australian tuner Bob Brown's legendary 851 bike coming up for sale. This is the bike with which he and Kevin Magee/Robert Holden really made a name for themselves, regularly smoking even Factory 851's. How? Apart from Magoo's and Holden's talent Brown thought well outside the box, casting up his own cylinders to make what was 888cc (yes, the racing 851's are actually 888cc) closer to 1000cc. And after struggling with the fuel injection system he opted for the devil he knew, turfed the EFI, and fitted 2 x FCR flat slide carbs to each cylinder and fabricated a custom alternator cover to fit a Krober ignition system. It's just a hell of a thing, and an absolute weapon at the time. See below:
I just think it's uber-cool, with clever alternative solutions all over the bike. But the thing that really cranked up the clockwork in my head was rather than gusset a couple of the critical frame joints as the Corsa bikes had, Brown added extra triangulation instead. As soon as I saw it I was reminded of the extra frame rails added to 2003 - 2006 999RS/F03-6 race frames in a similar (upper only) position. Brown was a over a decade ahead of the game:
Compare a "standard" 888 Corsa race frame below. It has small gussets welded at the section where the frame narrows down (all road bikes except the later SP3's have no gussets). Brown's triangulation looks to my uneducated eye a much more effective means of bracing the "hinge" point.
From all accounts it extended case life dramatically by relieving some stress from the engine. Remembering that on these bikes the swingarm pivots from the cases alone with no frame support, so the cases are under a fair torsional load as well as having their insides thrashing around at +12krpm: outrageous numbers for a twin back then.
Hmmmm, I reckon I'll just file that away for later reference.....
Notice that the 851 and 888 frames that seem so similar at first glance are actually a tad different. Compare the above footrest hangers to those on an 851 frame below. The earlier long hangers make it very difficult to find aftermarket rearsets, and they are also easily cracked/broken in a crash.
The other obvious (if you know where to look) difference is the point where the main frame rails turn into the head stock: the 888 has simple bent tubes where the 851 has welded joints.
But all good things come to an end, right? Yes and no. The 851/888 were never really mainstream bikes, they were only made in numbers that any of the Japanese Big 4 would knock out before morning smoko, but that all changed with the release of the Ducati Monster. It seems incredible that such a revolutionary "clean sheet" design was built from basically what ever bits were lying around the Ducati factory. One of those bits was the 851/88 frame, repurposed with a welded rear sub-frame. The 2001 S4, with 4V 916 engine, was basically a naked 851/888.
As per Mark Twain's famous words "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated", the 851/888 lived long after it's supposed passing, with 851/888 framed versions of the Monster produced for a couple of decades thereafter.
