I've gone ahead and bought my second Ducati.
Summertime. Time to ride again, getting a bike for the season while the 900SS is laid up with major engine rebuild work.
It can be a bit of a saga, the fun and games involved in attempting to secure a reasonably reliable ride in the sub-$7K used bike market in NZ. First I had to be sure about the bike that I wanted to buy. Then I had to find an acceptable example to make an offer on.
Bikes with totally dead batteries (twice), rocketships with bent up front ends (oops), bikes that are too far away to go and look at (dammit), and bikes where the seller tells flat out lies about needed and pricey work having been done. Yep. It's chaos out there.
After a while of these fun and games I finally realised that there's a certain amount of banged up that I'm going to get. Perfect isn't really on the menu. About the best I could hope for was something fundamentally OK, with imperfect plastics and paint but a strong motor and a straight chassis. If it was unpopular then that'd help with the bucks too. There was also a non-negotiable chance that I wouldn't be able to resell it. If that happened then I'd better buy something that I'm OK with keeping for a while.
I'm not interested in top end power. Most of my riding is back country roads at sane speeds, so I don't need the latest and greatest to do what I want to do. What I do need is something I can manage, afford, and have some fun on.
Ducati ST. There's a whole family of these largely ignored sport tourers. Here's the quick sum-up:
ST2: lower powered with simple 2V maintenace. Pantah-derived engine.
ST3: most useable engine of the range, fiddly maintenance, looks like a Honda.
ST4: superbike engine, a wolf in sheep's clothing, superbike maintenance.
The 3 and 4 had 'S' versions with Ohlins suspension goodies, lightened builds and uprated engines. All ST engines are liquid cooled and fuel injected. All bikes feature Ducati's signature trellis frames, excellent handling, the possibility of mounting hard bags, and a (by Ducati standards anyway) downright reasonable riding position. The 3 aside, everything in the range shares the same bodywork.
The 2's are considered a bit plain Jane and underpowered (by sport touring standards anyway), but for me there are some very strong advantages. Most of the ones I saw on the used market came with the bags. The engine's a simple beast that I'm already mostly familiar with. Aside from injection and liquid cooling, it's basically a continuation of the 900SS engine. I already have most of the skills and tools needed to look after the bike.
The 3's don't turn up in the market often. They're the oddball Ducati engine: 3 valves, 2 inlet and one exhaust. Apparently it's the pick of the bunch in terms of how the engine behaves in real world riding. Either there weren't that many made in the first place, or people who have them don't give them up willingly. Maybe both are true. I didn't get the chance to test one, unfortunately.
The 4's are very likely to have been modded, ridden hard, and crashed hard too, from what little I saw. They also don't turn up often in the used market with the bags, which I wanted to have. Desmoquattro superbike engines: big maintenance. Pull camshafts and check for rocker arm chrome flaking at every valve clearance interval, that kind of thing. The one 4s I managed to test ride had far more power than I'd ever need or want.
Right, an ST2 would probably be it... a mate and I took a car up to a dealership, spent an hour plus going over the bike and test riding it, then I made an offer. A spot of negotiation, a deal struck and some paperwork later I had a ride for summer. There were no issues riding it home, roughly 300-ish k of lotsa fun through the twisties and annoyance at slowpokes on the main roads.
There are a few things to sort out, starting with an issue I noticed at the dealership and used as a basis for making a reduced offer: the state of the gearbox output shaft spline and front sprocket. The dry red horror of the second photo shows what we saw when the plastic front sprocket cover came off. The third photo shows the detail I noticed on the dealer floor: the chain wasn't tracking on its plastic runner correctly. This was the only external warning sign.
One of the nice features about the ST series swingarm design is that a riveted chain will come off without any messing around. All I had to do was to get the clutch slave cylinder out of the way and then to release the front sprocket.
I found metal splinters all over the chain, when I washed it. The front sprocket's internal splines are badly beaten up but still barely useable. The sprocket retainer is totally shot - the locking teeth are completely worn away - and the front sprocket is badly worn on the inside flank (where the chain meets the teeth), due to having run close to the engine for quite some time.
Bookmarks