Has anyone torn down into their Panigale this much this during this covid time? These motors are beautiful inside!
I was wanting to but I’m pretty bad at the editing side of things! I’ll work on it more next time and give it a try when I refresh it next year as I want to see what wear I get on the custom valve guides I had fitted on the exhaust side!
Mechanical porn! Lovely. That’s a fair amount of metrology kit you have there. What’s the big black (heavy looking) part that holds the cylinder bores?
This pic where you are measuring the valve stems..?? Is that nail varnish you’ve got on ?.........are you Eddie Izzard ?!! Just pulling yer leg!....your a braver man than me,... I would have so many bits left over
yeah I’ve had that stuff for a few years as I’ve refreshed Japanese bikes quite a few times before! That black thing is a ducati tool to correctly space out and locate the crankshaft and cylinder liners when placing them in the crank cases.
Yeah I was measuring the valve stems for wear! The exhaust valve guides were pretty worn out and bell mouthed so had to send the heads off for new guides to be fitted!
Fascinating, thanks for posting. Do you know why there is so much wear on the valve guides? How many miles has the motor done?
Tbh I’m not sure! It’s the first time I’ve torn the motor down. Not sure if the Desmo valve train has something to do with it putting a side load to the valve. It’s had 16k miles on it and about 6k of the miles are from fast group pace trackday use. The wear was mostly bad on the exhaust valves as the intakes didn’t seem to wear much at all. But that’s to be expected as they run much hotter!
Thanks for posting Dean, nice quality pictures. Not sure if it's just the picture or it's smeared with oil/grease, but the left hand main journal in your second crankshaft picture doesn't look very happy.
Yeah that’s grease! I had smeared it with a coating of mineral grease to hold the plastigauge in place while checking clearance! The journal has marks of wear but nothing I can actually feel with a nail and the ovality and taper is in spec after I measured with a micrometer!
Sorry after reading your post properly I saw you’re referring to the left main journal, and not the rod journal that was smeared with grease. Yes it’s fine, just the light being blurred from the vice where it’s being gripped.
A lot of race teams run the metal gears. But the ducati TRI options guys have been running plastic gears for years and I haven’t heard of many major issues there with the plastic gears but I may be wrong. I haven’t noticed any major wear issues with them in my motor so far and it’s lived a fairly hard life at this point.
it's a brave decision to run some plastics in an oily environment but i'm sure they've done their testing and homework, It will be interesting to see how they fair given time as this is often the main factor when it comes to failure from oil exposure/immersion. I can think of a few car components that weren't such a bright idea in the long run.
This is amazing. I can't beleive the size of the pistons!! If i ever managed to strip an engine this far i would never be able to put i back together again. Fair play to you and great skills.
Great thread Dean and mighty impressed with the re build and attention to details. Hope all goes well when you give the bike a shake down.
Nice thread. 6k is a lot of miles on a tracked engine with the road miles aswell. So not tooooo bad considering
