Highway Biker
Yep I can vouch for the Mosfet RR's just replaced the OEM RR on my 03 Speed triple with one from a R1 the battery wouldn't charrge. It was a model FH020 luckily for me Triumph supplied a simple link lead to fit the new connectors and connect to the OEM harness plug and play thank God. very happy the Stator is all good and I hopefully wont be stranded again, heavy bike to push home....
Cheers
TC
Learning
Unfortunately I'd already ordered a replacement Electrosport ESR515 when I saw the replies.
Fastbikegear have the right Shindengen for the job:
http://www.fastbikegear.co.nz/index....oducts_id=6242
Looks like the way to go if there's another failure. In the meantime I've fitted the Electrosport, having properly taken the anodising off the mounting points and confirmed a decent ground connection.
I'd managed to borrow a current clamp meter, so had a play with this while the bike was running. Interesting numbers in the results:
Starting current (measured at the battery's negative terminal, as per photo) 70 A peak, 60 A continuous dc with starter motor engaged.
Alternator output current at approx 3000 RPM, 30 A. It was much less than this with the engine idling, roughly 5 - 7 A.
Rec/reg output to bike wiring loom, very approximate 10 - 12 A, highly dependent on lights, battery charge state etc.
Charging current to battery: slightly positive at idle with lights off, slightly negative with lights on, although it went positive again very quickly with some RPMs. Roughly 5 A at 3000 RPM, but I suspect that this will drop very quickly as the battery charges. Noticeable headlight flicker at idle.
While I was at it, I had a look at the conductor size and count of the various wires used through the generating system. I'm curious; I also want to be reasonably sure that it'll be reliable.
Current carrying capacity of stranded conductor isn't an exact science. There are tables available, but they're very approximate. A lot depends on the installation conditions of the conductor. If it's in an enclosed box, thickly insulated, bundled with other conductors, in a hot environment and so on, then not a lot of current can be put through it. If it's on its own and exposed to a cooling airflow then a lot more current than the tables recommend can pass. A lot of this is try-and-see, it's experience and iteration, with the tables used as a starting point.
Fastbikegear have a simplified table for automotive wiring: http://www.fastbikegear.co.nz/index....d8uo917bp8b5g1
The thinnest conductor I've got between stator and RR is 17 Ga, rated (conservatively) at 19 A. That's on the Electrosport RR, as issued. It goes into potting so there's no chance of uprating it. Everything else in the chain is 16 or 15 Ga, better but not up to the 30 A required, according to the table and my rough measurements.
On the face of it, the Electrosport leads are badly undersized. The rest of the system looks marginal. However Ducati's OEM system ran just fine with 16 ga wire for years. My other Electrosport RR's all had 17ga wiring and there were no problems with that either, so I think I'll be alright. There's plenty of access for air cooling via slipsteam.
The photo of a twist-together-and-solder wiring joint is included because I'd thought it might be useful for someone out there: halve the strands and do a twist on each side instead of just one. It tends to go together and stay together much better than the usual single twist. It's still not as neat as an inline crimp of course, and also the solder joint is vulnerable to fatigue and shouldn't be flexed or subjected to vibration.
An interesting side note is that twinned leads in the stator are used. This looks like a basic Litz wire setup. Parallel conductors which are insulated from each other are used to minimise skin effects at high frequencies, that is, most of the current moving from the core of the wire to the skin, reducing conductor capacity. The bike's crankshaft can spin up to 9000 RPM, with generator output matching that frequency. Presumably it was worth doing.
Anyway, with my stator leads... 30 A is quite a bit of power. It looks like the trick to keep in mind is simple: don't rev the hell out of the bike at the lights and I should be OK. In the meantime, the bike's charging again, that means it's fairings back on and go out and ride.
Last edited by OddDuck; 18th November 2016 at 18:42. Reason: Table source / clean up wire gauge stuff
Learning
Out and riding today! 300 miles or so.
In terms of how the bike's going... no issues with battery charging. There were a couple of minor engine issues, I'll detail them for anyone else doing rebuild work.
Clutch: had a spot of clutch slippage. I think this is happening if the plates bind on the hub or basket and then skew, so there isn't proper loading across friction plate and steel faces. The fix is to unload the clutch and then squeeze the lever a few times, to get the stack to squish down properly again. This can be done by shutting down and putting the bike into neutral, or even while rolling by pulling the clutch in a few times. Matching throttle and velocity helps.
Neutral isn't any easier to find, either. I presume that the clutch will settle down over time as everything beds together.
Gear change: much improved post shimming, but I still had a false neutral going from 4th to 5th. It's a problem with the gearbox design. The shaft carrying 5th and 6th gears rotates slower than the shaft carrying 1,2,3 and 4. It needs longer for the drive dogs to engage properly. The fix is in the rider: use a dwell period when changing gears instead of punching the lever.
Carburettor tuning: still waiting on those jets. In the meantime I'm running rich when tootling around through 50 zones, and increasingly lean in 100 zones. Unfortunately that can't be helped without those parts, time to call Cycletreads and see what the story is.
Aside from that - I have the first bugs of the season to get off the leathers and it's damn good to get out again. My reflexes have suffered a bit over the layup - too much driving a car - so I'm taking it easy until I settle into the bike again. In the meantime I'm perfectly happy to pootle and gradually work on the chicken strips.
Learning
On the Monday I decided I was fed up with waiting on Cycletreads and so I jumped onto Google and then Amazon and went shopping.
It turns out that EBC Brakes sell (in partnership with Abax Engineering) several jet kits, for the various Keihin flatslide carburettors. A little reading to confirm which kit to order, get the credit card out and pay for the fastest shipping, and it's here on Friday night. This is a full kit, two of each, every size from 165 up to 238, and pricing (even with fast shipping) was very good.
Straight down to the garage and into it... Something that might be useful, not carburettor related, that I should have mentioned earlier: it's quite easy to bundle the cables going to and from the CDI units and coils together. It packages nicely and runs neatly past the throttle cable pulley assembly. This is how Ducati arranged the lines, or at least it's how the bike was when I bought it. It's not a good idea to do this. I've separated the HT lines from the pickup coil lines instead, getting as much of a gap between the parallel runs as possible.
The reason for this is inductive and capacitive pickup between parallel conductors. This is a very well known problem in electronics - if you have two conductors running side by side, and you fire a pulse down one, you'll get a small pulse on the other. Magnitude of that pulse depends on how close the conductors are, the length of the parallel run, rise and fall time of the pulse, and the pulse peak voltage and current, plus a host of other variables like capacitive dialectric value between the lines.
Where this is relevant to bikes is that this effect can really mess up how the bike runs, due to interference with ignition timing and spark strength. If the pickup coil lines are too close to the HT lines, the false pulse on the coil pickup line generated every time the plugs fire will lead to a small discharge on the CDI unit through the coils. That means both a false spark, if that pulse is strong enough, and reduced energy for the real spark when it's time to fire properly.
Fix #1: separate the HT leads from the pickup coil leads.
Fix #2: put a grounded sheath braid of some kind over the pickup coil leads, to provide screening.
Anyway, after all that - the bike ran one hell of a lot smoother once I'd applied Fix #1. I didn't bother going as far as #2.
And back to carburettor tuning - fairings off, tank up, and I was very pleased to find out how easy it is to change main jets on the FCR41's. There's a cap on the base of the float bowl, sealed with an O-ring. A 14mm spanner takes that straight off - keep something handy to catch about 50cc of petrol, there's no drain on these carbies - and then you have access to the main jet with a standard 6mm ring spanner. A 6mm socket is useful for spinning it on or off, too.
Petrol on hands is an issue. Unleaded has a lot of carcinogenic / neurotoxic nasties in it, things like toluene and benzene, and I've heard too many stories about people coming down with chronic conditions from repeat exposure to chemicals to be casual about this. I've already got weird dry, peeling and cracked bits of skin on one fingertip pad from something, probably working with CRC while papering valve shims down. I tried working with dishwashing gloves (having run out of nitrile disposables) but these went super slippery with petrol and then broke up. In the meantime I kept going... one exposure I can live with, but I want gloves for the next time.
Anyway, I switched from 155 mains to 190's, changed needle clip positions from 5th back to 3rd from top, and went for a ride. The AFR gauge now tells me that it's rich at closed throttle, about right at 1/8th through 1/4, then progressively more and more lean further through the throttle range. It went right out to 18+ while climbing a hill at 80 k's. That's really not good. When I came back I realised that I didn't have a measure for what the throttle is doing - I've just been going on feel - hence the masking tape / Sharpie throttle position measure.
For now I've tried putting the idle mixture adjustment screw back in by 1/4 of a turn, leaving the slow air jet alone, and shifting the needle clip position to 4th (middle of the needle range). I haven't had the chance to test the new settings yet.
Learning
A few more tweaks...
Slow jet: 60
Idle mix screw: 1.25 turns out
Slow air screw: 1.5 turns out
Needle clip: 6th from top
Main jet: 212
Target AFR mixture: 13 to 14
Throttle position vs AFR readings:
Closed - 10 / 11
1/8th - 11 / 12
1/4 - 12-ish
1/2 - 13 / 14
1/2+ - unsure, probably still a bit lean.
The masking tape and Sharpie throttle position gauge is helping.
It's starting to look like a dyno or a legal top speed track is needed to go further. The accelerator pump throws a 30 second transient into the readings - the bike runs rich while opening throttle due to the pump - and it's very difficult to keep things vaguely legal or safe while waiting for the engine to settle down to steady state conditions again. About the best I've got locally is Ngauranga gorge, where I can hold the throttle at a bit past halfway for long enough to get a reading. Full throttle just isn't happening under normal NZ conditions, although this tuning-on-highways method might work with a bike with 60 HP or less.
This said - it is working, albeit gradually. The bike was running better than ever last night - smooth, instant response, lots of get up and go according to the seat of the pants. No popping on overrun or high revving when returning to idle, either. Noise is starting to be controlled properly, too.
It's also becoming clear that the original airbox did actually help flow air at low RPMs. A long time back in this thread I'd calculated that resonant frequency of the airbox was around 2000 to 3000 RPM. The pod filters don't have that response, so I've lost a little of the initial pickup from the lights. The tradeoff is in how much more air the pods flow at mid to high RPMs. It's guesswork in the absence of a flowmeter or a dyno, but the AFR readings kind of tell the story... rich down low, lean to super lean up high. No wonder people talk about re-jetting when going to pods.
It's also clear that the bike does intake hot air from the engine at speeds below 50 k's. The mixture ratio drops a point or two sitting at the lights or rolling slow in traffic. That's not fixable in the absence of a cold air intake, but it shouldn't be a big deal once I get the slow jets I've ordered and re-tune the lower end of the throttle range.
Learning
The bike's done 1,500 miles since rebuild, odometer's now at 57,000 or so. I've spent the last few days of bad weather going through and doing a few checks and regular service.
The re-cut, re-lapped valves haven't moved. Clearances are still what they were on rebuild - mostly. The vertical exhaust opener was a little tight, at 0.003" to 0.004", so I took it off and papered 0.025mm off it to open the clearance up to the specified 0.004" to 0.005". Closer shims are a little loose but serviceable. I had to check the vertical inlet closer a few times before I decided to go with what was there, but it'll be up for replacement at the next interval.
One thing I ended up regretting was not having taken notes of exactly what shim sizes were used. Clearances are measured with a feeler gauge, but the shim lengths can only be measured with the shims removed from the engine. With cylinder heads still in place, this can get fiddly - the timing pulley has to be in the right place to allow the opener rocker arm to slide across and open up the valve stack. Having these measurements would allow the next size up and down shims to be pre-ordered before the next service. Unfortunately this thought only occurred once I'd got the motor back together again. It'll be worth doing next time around, even if all the shims are still OK.
Timing belts have loosened up a bit and had to be re-tensioned. They're in the last 3,000 miles of service life and will have to be changed at the next interval, at 60,000 miles. I used the 5mm (horizontal cylinder) and 6mm (vertical cylinder) allen key feeler gauge method again, erring on the side of slightly too loose.
The oil change wasn't a problem until the filter jammed. This engine's filter design has had me swearing on more than this occasion... the bloody thing is placed in a well in the crankcase. If the filter cup wrench isn't placed perfectly and slips, thus ruining the flats, there's no chance of getting a strap wrench onto the thing. Driving a screwdriver through the wall of the filter is possible but this didn't get it to loosen - I ended up just shearing the filter casing wall. In the end I had to take a plank of wood, mark out 8 holes plus center, and use self-tapping screws to fasten this to the oil filter's end. This got the bastard to loosen and it spun off from there.
The OEM workshop manual says to tighten the oil filter to 13 - 15 N.m. or so, while the oil filter itself says just 11 N.m. I must have tightened according to the manual, no wonder it bonded on too tight. I've had similar problems in the past with not using fresh engine oil to lubricate the filter's rubber seal ring. The original packing oil used isn't thick enough and if this fresh oil isn't used, the filter will bond into place good and tight even at 11 N.m. Dramas ensue.
One check I took was to pull the mesh screen (on inlet to the oil pump) and check what has been trapped there. This check should be done at every second oil change and definitely after doing engine work. There were a few light metal flakes - aluminium I think - and quite a bit of balled-up gunk which looked like fibres from gaskets or bits of loctite. The metal flakes are something I'm not sure about. They could be bits of plating off the new big-end bearings (that's a worry), loose bits of remaining swarf from the dremel work I did inside the casings to get snap rings out, or possibly the new crankshaft journal plug has unscrewed itself and is being shaved against the bearing, as the old one did. For now, there wasn't nearly enough to justify stripping the motor again to investigate. I'll check again at the 60,000 and see.
Winding the rear shock up a bit has worked, I haven't touched the exhaust pipes down since. The bike wallows a lot less in corners as well.
Exhaust headers had loosened, or possibly hadn't been tightened enough to start with. It's very easy to go sideways on these headers while tightening and I found it necessary to hold the header flange plate flat with one hand, tighten the first nut until the visual gap closed (but not actually tight on the flange), tighten the second nut in the same way, and then go from there.
I also swapped the AFR gauge sensor, from the vertical cylinder to the horizontal, to finally check differences in tuning between these.
Yep, they're different. It's not by much but the horizontal is running a point or two leaner at low throttle openings, balancing to about the same at mid throttle or higher. Both cylinders are still running far too rich at closed to 1/4 throttle. I'm still waiting on my slow jets (c'mon Amazon) and will have to continue tuning later.
Last edited by OddDuck; 2nd January 2017 at 13:27. Reason: AFR notes at the end
Learning
I came back from the first ride post-service with oil coming out of the clutch cover drain. There have been a couple of clutch slips while riding, also neutral is getting hard to get into again, so apart it comes.
After pulling the springs, swashplate, stack, hub and then basket, to visually check all oil seals, it looks like the leak is through the tiny 12 x 8 x 3 shaft seal on the pushrod. Everything else checks out OK. The leak has been flung outward and hasn't contaminated the plate stack.
In a couple of ways it's a funny system... the pushrod, from the clutch actuator, crosses right from one side of the engine to the other. There's a couple of O-rings to seal it against gunk coming in from the chain's drive sprocket, then it's open to the engine's alternator and gear shaft compartments. These are splash-lubricated of course. Then the pushrod runs full length inside one of the gear shafts, with a roller bearing and then finally the shaft seal at the far end. There's only that one seal on the pushrod and it doesn't appear to have a spring-reinforced lip, it's purely rubber.
The pushrod came out soaked in engine oil (it used to be dry) so clearly it's being wetted from somewhere. Unfortunately I have no idea where or how this is happening. Maybe one of the gear shaft bearings was supposed to have an outboard seal, maybe the re-shimming of the selector drum is letting oil drip down onto the pushrod.. further investigation needed, but I'm not splitting the motor casings again if replacing the seal cures the problem. In the meantime I've tried applying a spot of high-temperature grease to the seal area as a temporary measure.
The clutch refusing to let go enough that neutral can be selected was a different issue. I took a good long look at the hub and the plates.
The hub's picking up some notching with use (this won't help). The plates were checked for flatness with the aluminium plate I'd used as a welding table, and surprise surprise, a few of them are warped. One at the base of the stack was warped quite badly. File this under 'should have been done the first time', I'd just looked and assumed it was good enough.
Any spring in the plate stack will affect the clutch releasing. The Oberon clutch slave has only 1.3mm of lift, and with 9 steels and 7 friction plates, it doesn't take much non-flatness per surface to keep clutch plates in contact. I didn't have replacements for the friction plates (they were OK anyway) but I did have an old pack of clutch steels which I'd saved.
Pressing the steels down onto the impromptu surface table, both ways around and rotated, pressing on one side, quickly showed if they were bowed or dished. I swapped plates around until I had a flat set, then set to with the needle files to chamfer the inner spline teeth so that they wouldn't cut into the hub splines and then jam up. This took a few hours work but I believe it's worth doing.
I also took the time to paper the swashplate, finding that in addition to clutch dust and corrosion, it wasn't flat as released by the factory. My guess is that it's held in a three-jaw fixture and lathed. The three jaws will distort it enough that a very slight three-lobed non-flatness will result. With the OEM clutch slave and it's high force / high lift, this isn't a problem. It is with the Oberon.
I tested as I went, reassembling the clutch stack and springs several times:
Flattening swashplate: slight improvement in clutch release
Replacing single, badly warped base steel: big improvement, roughly half of previous clutch drag
Going through stack and carefully selecting the best steels: best performance so far, near complete clutch release when lever pulled in.
Of course they may warp the first time I gun the bike at the lights, but I'll just have to try that and see.
Learning
The reassembled clutch is a joy to use. No issues when riding and gearchanges - including neutral at the lights - have never been easier.
Unfortunately I came back from the latest ride with a fresh problem. The horizontal cylinder exhaust header loosened enough that the bike started popping on overruns, and the exhaust beat itself could be clearly heard when the motor was cold. The interesting bit was monitoring the AFR gauge, since the sensor was in place on this cylinder when this happened.
AFR readings went from slightly lean to very lean - 16 / 17+ - in a very short space of time. As symptoms got worse, the indicated mixture got leaner and leaner.
Another ride, another day in the garage... I took fairings off and then removed the entire exhaust system. It became clear that the vertical cylinder gasket was barely making contact, and the horizontal cylinder gasket had been crushed on one side only. The sealing material between the gasket's metal faces was disintegrating and falling out, leaving the gasket as a squashed metal ring, with big air gaps. This was entirely my fault, I'd installed the exhaust headers skewed, and with the gaskets barely contacted - there wasn't the proper crush applied.
So why did this happen... I'd previously used plain BZP flange nuts to hold the exhaust headers onto the cylinder heads. This was vulnerable to the nuts loosening and falling off while new (that happened once) or rusting onto the studs permanently if the bike was ridden through a winter (that happened too). I finally got my act together and bought some of the proper Ducati flange nuts, which seem to be a very high-quality copper-bronze of some kind. They're pre-squashed so they're tight on the flange stud threads, and being an alloy they don't rust onto the studs. The problem with them is that the feel I'd had with spin-on, spin-off fasteners wasn't there, and that's what I'd been using to evaluate gasket crush before. I'd also been going very light on fastener torque, being worried about ripping threads right out of the nuts.
This time I took a few hours to have a play with refitting the headers, making sure that gaskets and flanges were aligned properly before tightening up. I did a lot of checks with verniers, finding that the exhaust ports, exhaust headers, flanges etc were all properly square as manufactured. This meant that a relatively simple check with a feeler gauge of some kind, between cylinder head and header flange, would ensure that the exhaust gasket was being crushed square instead of skewed.
In the end I found that positioning everything by hand, with finger-spun plain M8 flange nuts, and using a few Allen keys as the needed feeler gauges, worked. I had to run the nuts on the stud threads, with some CRC 5.56, a few times to clean the threads up first. There was no gasket crush applied at this point, this was just fitting everything to place and making sure it was all square. The system has to be assembled complete with the mufflers, since these affect the height of the header clamp joint at lower rear of the engine.
This done, the proper Ducati flange nuts were fitted and tightened in stages, keeping the flanges as square as possible during this. The manual specifies roughly 22 N.m. torque, but it's an old workshop manual and I wasn't sure that the nuts would take this amount of force. In end I went to roughly 16 N.m., tightening by hand and applying around 1 mm crush to the gaskets.
It's clear from the photos that neither cylinder had been sealed properly before. This will have affected tuning, so I'll have to re-check both cylinders.
Forum whore
This thread keeps on giving. I admire your patience and problem solving ability. You have talked me out of ever owning a Ducati! I don't recall if you had your rear shock serviced when the bike was stripped? If not, why not? If so, if you set your sags for your weight f&r, the bike should handle better, rather than an exploratory " bit more preload" on the rear?
In the riders seat
To be fair he is a OTT compared to most owners and the aircooled twins from that era are the easiest to live withOriginally Posted by SVboy
I should send him the 900 I have in the shed but I doubt I could afford the labour bill
"If you can make black marks on a straight from the time you turn out of a corner until the braking point of the next turn, then you have enough power."
Bored Room
You have a rubber bandy one?
DeMyer's Laws - an argument that consists primarily of rambling quotes isn't worth bothering with.
Learning
Rear shock hasn't been serviced yet. Two reasons: money got tight at the peak of the engine rebuild (I'm still clearing the credit card now) and suspension is something I'm still learning. My one track day made it quite clear that attention to suspension is needed if I'm on the brakes going in and on the throttle out of corners, but what I normally use the bike for is back country riding at a reasonable pace. For that, so far, it's been fine. You're right of course - correctly setting the suspension up is the next big thing to take on, but maybe that's best done next winter.
Ducati ownership:
Total strangers will stop what they're doing to cross the road and tell you "that's a beautiful bike mate". I've had people hanging out of car windows to hear the bike better.
Other bikers will confess envy (if they're young) or offer sympathy (if they've already been there).
Cops will take one look and assume outlaw riding is going on.
Garages / mechanics / dealerships will assume you are loaded with heavy and inconvenient bricks of spare cash.
Harley guys (OK, this did happen, but just the once) may have a sudden and terrible urge to take you on.
Your mother will worry about you. More than usual, anyway.
Spare parts are surprisingly available if you're from a Jappa background and home wrenching, although involved, is generally possible. You will do more maintenance than a Japanese bike, at least on a mid 90's. I can't speak for the newer generations.
The highs are awesome. The lows though... expect some mental things to go wrong. Frames that crack before 60,000 km's or engines that need rebuilds. Even the latest Panigales have wing mirrors that can snap off if the owner brushes past them the wrong way. Ducati doesn't do durability very well.
Beautiful to ride, though.
Forum whore
The English journalist Rupert Paul bought an 03 SS iirc and then proceeded to make it better, esp in the suspension area. He wrote a series of articles in Performance Bikes a few years ago. Would be worth looking up perhaps?
Forum whore
Meh - Yamahas have gearboxes that need recalling, Suzuki have sub-frames that break, there are Triumphs that burnt shit loads of oil, Aprilia V4 recalls etc etc.
Ducati pulled finger on quality some years back, and needed to. Service intervals keep getting push out - belts and valve clearances on mine are at 24,000 - the latest engines are 30k. Japanese engineering figures. Mind you the book does not say how many 24-30k services you get! Time will tell.
They are still all assembled by hand I read recently - I don't know if that is actually a good thing! It may explain some of the little quirky things.
Quirky things - that people call 'character' but if it was a Jap bike they would bitch about them. How's that?
Writing this I can't recall reading about or hearing about any real issues with a specific model, engine or 'part' on a Harley - well other than the owner and their issues. I must be wrong.
Learning
Why thankyou, but I'm not a pro by any means. Just trying to get my bike running properly. I post in detail because maybe this stuff will be useful for someone else out there driving a spanner, also writing up helps me to sort my thoughts out and remember what I've been doing.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks