...where the damn starter should be!
Sorry, you can't see it in the previous pic's, I pretty much dropped my phone when I realised it, but there was just a blank machined plate where the starter should have been fitted! Shit! I never imagined I would be so gutted to see a beautifully made billet Corse part.
It was a white knuckled hand that clutched at the handle of my beer fridge the way a drowning man clutches at a life buoy.
Once I'd calmed the farm, I eventually managed to contact the seller. I'd gone over and over our communications, looking for something I had missed, bearing in mind the second language difficulties the guy would have been dealing with....but even in hindsight there were no clues. Cue the steam starting wafting out of my ears again, convinced I'd been dudded. It was still an amazing engine, every visible nut/bolt titanium, ergal cam pulley's, vented Corse clutch cover and sand cast cases etc etc, it was a genuine World Superbike/AMA refugee.....but the absence of a starter meant my "simple fix" was neither simple nor a fix in the short term.
But after talking to the seller my feathers were a bit less ruffled. We'd been corresponding on and off for a month or so over this engine while in typically male fashion I struggled to commit and looked at other options. So given the language barrier it's not that suprising that something was literally lost in translation and/or he thought I was just another tyre kicker and didn't cover all the details. A couple of emails apparently disappearing into the ether (junk folder?) at a critical point only exacerbated the situation.
Now I knew from discussions he actually had 2 of what are very rare engines, one had a small amount of dyno/trackday miles on it, the other was box-fresh completely rebuilt. For whatever reason the key difference between them fell between the cracks: only the slightly used unit had a starter. In opting for the new engine he assumed I didn't need a starter when in actual fact I just didn't know.
But the fact he was prepared to strip the starter parts off the other engine and include some adapters to run OEM 749R/999R throttle bodies on the RS heads (the inlet ports are quite different) and send them half way around the world free of charge illustrated that his intentions were good. Hey, shit happens, and I appreciated his efforts in trying to rectify the situation.
So I headed away to work for a few weeks (nightshift...yawn) and woke one afternoon to an email from my good lady: a parcel had arrived from Italy! With fingers and toes crossed I asked her to email a picture of the contents........and sure enough, there were my precious starter parts.
The problem I'd had is that nearly all RS parts fit in a range of somewhere between subtly and completely different to OEM road bike parts.
If I was a betting man (with my luck? No way, Jose!) I would have put money on OEM starter parts fitting....but I wouldn't have risked an amount I wasn't prepared to lose, if you know what I mean.
And the parts above pretty much reinforce that "unease": they are interchangeable with OEM parts but are made with the intent of minimising performance losses and enabling the WSB-spec ECU. Hence the flywheel has the pick-ups for the secondary timing sensor (not used on the road bikes), it is lighter than even the 749R unit which is lightest of other Ducati's of the era, and the starter gears themselves are as much air as steel.
Compare the below components:
Versus the RS components:
Note the 8 pickups for finer, more accurate RPM measurement, the flywheel is both thinner, holier and waisted down compared to the R unit, while the lightweight starter gear is a shadow of its road going self. Additionally the alternator rotor which bolts onto this lot is also lighter than even the already light 'R unit, so there is considerably less rotational mass in just the starter components, let alone the crank etc.
FYI, the non-AMA WSB "flywheel" without any of the starter gubbins is quite incredible, literally just a wafer, with barely enough material to support the pick-ups:
