what if you lowered the front forks through the yokes down below 4 rings, and lowered the rear a bit on the adjuster. get a different seat pad that is thinner and less meat at its sides so your legs aint spread so much... learn to stop say right foot down and prepare for the stop with a click to neutral just before the wheels stop turning. with a defined lean towards putting your right foot down.....there are ways!
mate these things can go up and down like a fiddlers elbow.... theres 10mm to be had at the front and a bit at the rear of the bike keeping the stance and profile of the bike geometry correct particularly if you are riding it on the road. you could get another std seat strip the padding off and recover with 5.10.15mm seat foam losing the sharp edges to the pad
There's lowering and there's adjusting within the designed parameters, besides Gareth is taller than you
i think you are panicking and going off all over the place. do you want the bike? box clever then, adapt the bike to as near as you can for you, and adapt you to riding it then!
I could be wrong but I think the ride height is also altered by the position of the hub in the Swing Arm when the chain is adjusted. You may have just been unlucky and it's adjusted so it's at it's highest.
People also fuck about with their ride heights and suspension settings loads, often with little or no idea. My 996 was almost unrideable when i picked it up.
the whole purpose of the ride height adjuster is so when the rear eccentric hub is rotated to adjust the chain the ride height adjuster can be altered back down to reset the ride height to the datum, hence the ride height tool. Obviously you can go up or down from the datum in conjunction with altering the front forks too to set up the bike however you want it. There is obviously a science to suspension geometry not least the swing arm angle (something ducatis of the 90s and 2000s struggle with) so dont go too low. See if you can blag a datum tool then you can measure exactly where it is to start with, along with the height of the seat pad. You can then move it to wherever you want and physically see the decrease in height.
That rings a bell too, Maaybe this thing is just set up high, it felt higher than my 848 yet should be 10 mm lower
I seem to remember the 1*98 hub can’t be rotated 180deg from baseline as the chain hits the swing arm casting/tunnel. I may be wrong about that though.
Completely overlooked that, they say go to the simplest thing first, I rang Leeds council to see if it was feesable to lower the roads typically I rang on the day the phones were playing up as the line kept going dead after my question, but now I realise they probably just thought I was a nana for not letting air out the tyres....I am a der
from around 1995 up to 2012 there is a set of geometry numbers that fits just about all ducatis 748 998 999 1098 1198 etc etc numbers for (same reason most engines fit into the other bikes) rake trail swing arm angle wheel base If you put these numbers into a 1098 1198 the seat height rises dramatically, which is why as std set up they handle like a pig. measure it or get a big boy to do it, and start again.
