So I ended up buying the 996 with the 1098 forks, 848 wheels and carbon body. I got the chap down to £4650 from £5000, which I reckon was reasonable. He even delivered. Got the insurance sorted this morning (£190 with Carol Nash) and took it out for a quick spin. Blinkin' nora that thing is fast. I've had big sports bikes before but have spent the last 2 years riding an asthmatic old BMW K100, so this is a little different. Might take a while to get used to. The only annoying things are squashing my fingers with the clutch lever and getting it into neutral. Brilliant though.
The clutch problems can be solved quite easily if you are even moderately handy with spanners. The Ducati dry clutch is really easy to work on and easily sorted to your requirements. Do you hear the chatter from the clutch as characterful music or the nasty sound of metal bashing metal?? If the latter, there is an easy cure.
Can't go wrong with the 996, always feels special and puts a smile on my face on the odd occasion take the old girl out :thumbsup:
Getting into neutral is a bit of a practiced thing, assuming you have no clutch or gearbox issues (or anything else!). If you tap the gearlever whilst in second gear as you roll to a halt this should work better for you assuming you have normal road change setup and not race change. I know the bike you mean and I thought that whilst not a totally purist bike to get it for what you did I am sure you will be happy with it. Horses for courses and many buy a bog stock bike only to alter it in the way they won't and revert to standard when they sell. Enjoy it, and the good weather is upon us at the moment to give it a good try out. Good luck.
I can get neutral easily from either 1st or 2nd, stopped dead. Selecting neutral while rolling to a stop is a useful workaround but if you need to do it, imvho there is something wrong.
I think part of the gear selection issue stems from the fact that the peg and lever geometry is completely different from that on my BMW. I'm just not used to a stubby little gear lever. I'll get used to it.
The 748-9** Models have very stubby levers and I personally don't like the flat on the gear lever. The way the gearlever hinges on the triangular plate is not the best position to seemingly provide a lot of leverage. Further the spacing between first, neutral and second is very close and if you try and find neutral when stopped you can find yourself going backwards and forwards a few times before you hit neutral. Hence the technique above, which has been mentioned on this forum before, so there should be other posts on it. Ensure you clutch is set up properly though and the stack height is correct and that all linkage is lubricated and adjusted for the best possible change. I use Migliore rearsets on my bikes and these pivot on the footpeg and tend to give a neater gear change for me. However I believe Migliore recently stopped production of these rearsets.
Certainly the gearchange is different on the 749-999 and If I remember correctly the gearchange pedal toe portion (or possibly the brake, or both?), itself can slide backwards and forwards. Also the 749-999 has a Testastretta engine whereas apart from the 998 the others do not. The 998 used the 748-9*6 style of gearchange. Whether internally, other than ratios, the Testastretta engines have any modifications to the gearbox assembly I don't know as I have never seen it mentioned. Perhaps someone else could confirm that fact.
I have had considerable trouble with clutch drag in the past but was able to cure it with attention to the clutch stack. IMHO, drag is likely to be the problem rather than lever geometry. First place to check is air in the hydraulics. Actually no. The first thing to check is lever span. There has to be some play in the lever to avoid constant load on the pushrod but that play should be only 2or3 mm in order to give as much span on the lever as possible. The more movement you can get on the lever end, the more you will get at the pressure plate.
Right, well I've just ridden it into central London from rural Bedfordshire for the second day and IT'S TOTALLY AWESOME!!!!! Nowhere near as bad around town as I feared. No worse than my old SV1000, apart from a very hot right leg and the thing with neutral (now sussed). It's really well behaved actually. A bit lumpy on an almost closed throttle until warmed up, but practically civilised. And out on the road, oh. I've never seen a a bike that tracks so well. It's been a good while since I've been on a bike that likes to lean so much, but I think once I'm used to it again it'll be so much fun. I bypassed the sidestand switch on the weekend and as soon as I get a chance I'll be wiring up a little circuit to link it to the neutral switch. Better safe than sorry. The only slight issue (and one that I'm really annoyed with myself over) is that I got the manual out for the Translogic dash and had a go at changing it from lap timing to trip mode. Somehow I seem to have managed to reset the entire unit. So nothing works, apart from the temp gauge. So now I'm going to have to go through and reprogram the whole bloody thing. tits. But apart from that, i'm a very, very happy camper. It's the sort of bike which makes you feel special just sitting on it, and being able to see it from my office window at work is a nice bonus.....
It's not too bad, the worse part is setting the speedo (unless you have access to a dyno). I found the best way is to fasten a car sat-nav (or phone with GPS speedo) to your top yoke so that you can set the speedo at a known 30mph, but you really want a long, straight and empty road to do it. That and you'll probably need a copy of the manual with you (unless you can memorise it) to remind you how to set the gear indicator afterwards...
Cheers. The manual is not really all that clear. Although the fact that the whole thing needs to be programmed with one button probably doesn't help. Thankfully I have both a sat nav and a nice long straight.
Having been away for a week on holiday, I came home to find my new stickers had arrived (yay) and managed to grab an hour to set up the Translogic dash. But I had a bit of an issue... The first thing you set up is the rev counter shift lights. The manual says to rev 1/2 way to the desired redline and then press the button to confirm. In normal running the dash just shows the revs as a graduated bar, but I'd assumed (hoped) that during set up, it would show the actual revs numerically. Unfortunately it doesn't actually show anything. Only once you've chosen a redline does it even show the graduated bar. So the issue I've got, is that unless I take it on a dyno, how can I know where 5,000 revs is to be able to set the 10,000 redline? This is really annoying as I managed to dial in the rest of the functions using a sat nav and a nice quiet bit of local road. Pics to come soon, I promise. Probably this weekend when I give it a wash and apply the new stickers.
oh.... I'll have a look at the manual and check it's all wired up ok. It reads the revs, once it's set. so it's clearly getting the appropriate signal.
after a lengthy look online, it seems that everything is working as it should. The revs do need to be set up using either a dyno or a piggybacked rev counter. Seems a bit shit, but I guess the TL unit is a lot less than some more sophisticated dashes. Looks like I'll be buying a little dyno time....
