Blue-printing: The Verdict.

What do you do when you've spent top money on an immaculate, low mileage, Termi-fitted 1098 SF, then spent more getting it custom mapped and running sweet as a nut? Obviously you furnish Louigi-Moto and CJS performance with £3200 and have them take a pristine engine apart and put it back together again with another remap barely six months later.

So why do it and what's it like?
I knew as soon as I'd bought this bike it was keeper. Its a proper old-school analogue road bike. Plain, simple and ballsy. Cacophonous and charismatic. Every ride is an occasion. They don't make em like this any more and they probably won't again. But clearly it was hamstrung by rotten fuelling, emissions restrictions and a general, mass-production, one-size-fits-all looseness.
I was more than happy with the results from the first re-map and exhaust valve removal:
Remap Completed, Results In: | Ducati Forum
Perfect fuelling and a fatter, crisper, creamy smooth power delivery. But there was definitely more in there itching to get out. Why have sufficient when you can have more?
Rich Lewellyn had already sown the seed by educating me on the virtues of the 1098 Testastretta engine: a tough, well engineered unit and a tuner's blank canvas with potential for considerable performance gains from relatively simple modifications. Not something that can be said of many modern bike engines. So what, in his opinion, was the single most cost-effective improvement I could make? Blue-printing and balancing, he said. He could all but guarantee a minimum 10% power increase simply from screwing the engine together properly. Tighter tolerances would extend service intervals, suspect main bearings fitted to early 1098s would be replaced with proven items. It would be a smoother, stronger, more powerful and more reliable engine. The trick, he said, was to take the plunge and do this to a sound engine, not wait (as most people do) till old age or internal failure forces a rebuild when the costs can go through the roof and unseen stress and fatigue make the results uncertain. It made sense. But its a road bike. I didn't want a track screamer. Grunt and midrange are where its at. You can't have too much of those. Its got a blistering top-end and that's good. I like that. Could we keep the top-end delivery intact, increase it even, but add punch and aggression everywhere else and retain good road-bike manners and all-round usability? Easy! he said. No need for expensive after-market internals. They could deliver what I wanted with stock internals. They'd do a full rebuild, blue-printed, dynamically balanced, and some other "things".
In other words, the sort of engine Ducati might have built if emissions laws and mass-production constraints (accountants) had let them.
It was a ride in/ride out job. They took the bike in just before Christmas. Give me a ring I said, when the engine's out and I'll come up and collect the exhaust pipes and take them home for a polish up. But there's no hurry. I'd heard nothing by the middle of January so I rang Rich and asked if the engine was out because I was coming up to Bristol anyway and I could pick the pipes up on the way. Oh its finished, he said. You can take it home if you like. What the whole bike? Yep, all done.
The bike had gone in clean, oiled, polished and immaculate. It came out looking better. The great rolls of gasket cement which Ducati like to leave oozing out of the casing joints daubed with thumb prints were gone and everything looked as neat as a new pin. There wasn't a mark to show the engine had been out.
It turned out the main bearings were the older, stronger type and did not need replacing. (Maybe its the early 1098's (mine is 2010) that had the suspect bearings fitted before Ducati learned their lesson and went back to ones that worked?) Chris Steedman had rebuilt the heads. Rich does not believe in polishing ports. He says it destabilises the fuel/air mixture. What matters is that the ports are the right shape and identically paired. Mine were nearly perfect and required minimal work but the clattery valve clearances were shimmed down to the finest tolerances. The crank was balanced, the gearbox shimmed, the flywheel lightened by 30%, the heads skimmed and the inlet cams advanced to increase dynamic compression. It was this that Rich predicted would give me the midrange punch I was after. Then Chris mapped it again.

Below is the first printout from the earlier remap of the stock engine.
Ducati's factory power figures are taken at the gearbox. Chris's are rear wheel figures. You can expect to loose 10% in the drive train so Ducati's claimed power and torque figures look pretty accurate. Chris said the standard bike (with Termi cans and ECU) was running very rich at the top. Cleaning that up made a dramatic difference, clearly seen on the graph and clearly felt in seat of the pants accleration. Note that the torque figure is given at the point of maximum bhp but max torque actually occurs a little earlier. Midrange shove was boosted noticeably and the on/off throttle response smoothed. But there was still a hole in torque between the midrange and the start of the top-end.



This is the final remap after blue-printing, building on the improvements shown above.
If it could be done, I wanted a bit more of everything and that is what I've got. Power and torque everywhere is lifted and smoothed out. The bottom end has received a significant, tyre-squeaking torque boost, midrange torque is fatter and broader and the power and torque dip at 7K largely ironed out. Chris believes the exhaust system may be responsible for what remains of that dip. I also suspect the airbox and and intake ducts may play a part. But it hardly matters. Its a naked bike with 161 bhp at the back wheel and a whisker under 90 lb/ft of torque. The midrange dip has been plumped up by 10 lb/ft over the original figure and on the road the difference is transformative. The top end gets a 12 bhp boost, the power build continues to the limiter and maximum torque now comes in earlier still, enhancing the grunty feel of the whole delivery.


Its worth bearing in mind that the first remap was an unnecessary intermediate step. Without it the measurable performance increase of the blue-printing and remapping over the stock bike is even more apparent and amounts to an increase of 22 bhp and 14 lb/ft of torque.

So what's it like to ride? Well I asked for punch...
Dyno graphs only tell half the story. What they don't show is how the engine responds and feels. Blip the throttle at a standstill and the revs shoot skywards like a rocketing pheasant. Under way the immediate sensation is of grunt, grunt and more grunt. The potency off the throttle, in any gear at any revs feels neck-snapping compared to the old bike. The response is electric. Its a cliche but in this case I can't think of a better way to describe it: the throttle cable really does feel like its connected directly to the back wheel. Every slightest input and adjustment is transmitted instantly to the rear tyre. Nothing is lost in translation. There is no delay, no waiting for the engine to interpret instructions. Revs climb vertically. The bike rampages forward on a whiff of gas and in the first three gears the degree of front wheel lift is simply dialled in (or out again) with the right hand without fuss or apprehension. It is effortlessly naughty yet somehow the delivery remains perfectly modulated. Its controllable. The fuelling is flawless, the throttle action perfect. Power surges in and out precisely on command. There are no nasty surprises, nothing waiting to trip you up. The engine delivers clean, clear-throated performance and seamless thrust. And its louder.. It was no shrinking violet before.. It bellows through the rev range and back to tickover without a glitch or a stutter. Its always the same, predictable and consistent.
Considering the amount of valve overlap the bottom end power delivery is remarkably smooth. Chris says he can iron out cammy lumpiness with ignition timing. It is perfectly civilised round town. In fact its better than the stock bike. Holding a light throttle at low engine speeds the exhausts emit a percussive whump whump reminiscent of a small Chinook. The whole engine is smooth. Excepting the inevitable thudding of two four inch pistons flying up and down, this was never an overly vibey engine. But I used to get a buzz of tingling vibration through the exhaust shroud if I touched my heel against it. That has completely disappeared and the mirrors are clearer.
The effect of all this on rideability is something of a revelation. This is an easy bike to ride. I've noticed my style is getting smoother and I'm less likely to turn too soon. I think this is because there is less conscious effort required to get all the stars aligned before committing to a turn. It may have more power but its so crisp and clean its a flexible and forgiving sort of power. I'm much less preoccupied with clutch and rev counter. I can feel and listen to the bike and "think" my course through the bends. The gearbox feels slicker, and for road riding at least, the clutch is fighting less of a battle with the flywheel (they've lighten it by the perfect amount. That third off the weight was no arbitrary figure). It just works. It rockets out of turns on a stroke of the throttle, shimmying its bars, and I'm relearning once-familiar roads as I discover crests I didn't know existed before.
Its almost two bikes in one. Short-shifting below 7000 rpm produces a solid wave of relentless, tyre-eating propulsion in any gear. Push higher and the power soars upwards wildly. It screams off the dial like an inline four. North of 8000 rpm the clutch is not needed to lift the front wheel in forth gear. By any standard, this is now a seriously potent bike.

Drawbacks? Errm.. I guess fuel consumption has probably gone up. I've been having too much fun to record it yet but I will do so and first impressions do not indicate anything too drastic.
Its going to get through tyres, I can feel it and I can see it, but you can't have it all ways. I'll just have to start fitting my own. Until I got used to it the lightened flywheel made it slightly easier to stall. But I seem to have got the hang of that now. Care must be taken when starting a hot engine not to give it any throttle or it won't start and the battery will tire quickly. Rich said the high compression and the amount of air its gulping are too much for the battery and starter motor to spin over properly if the throttles are open. The answer is leave the throttle well alone when pressing the button and it rumbles into life every time. Battery maintenance will be important and Rich advised against using an optimiser.
The other thing is the performance is showing up the limitations of the suspension, particularly under top-end power. I'll service the forks and put some decent fluid in them but if needs be I could revalve the forks and fit an Ohlins TTX shock for about £1500. I'll reserve judgement until the fork fluid has been changed and the weather is warmer.

So was it worth it?
Yes. Emphatically. Without a shadow of a doubt. If/when I buy another Ducati I'll do it again. £3200 is a lot of money to spend on an engine that had absolutely nothing wrong with it. But blue-printing is not something only relevant on the track. This bike has been transformed out of all recognition. Rich and Chris and the boys have done a fantastic job. They haven't just thrown together a random collection of performance enhancements without a thought. Everything has been done to just the right degree so that together it all works perfectly. They listened to what I wanted and as Rich put it compiled a "recipe" which has nailed the brief completely. What they've done is create a barnstorming road bike. It was worth every penny.

 

The deciding factor for me was the possibility that the main bearings might be suspect. I want to keep this bike. I want to ride it to Europe. I've done nearly 4000 miles on it since last June and I want to do many more. The primary objective was to achieve a strong reliable engine - a brand new engine - in which I could have total faith. Those bearings were an unknown factor. If the engine was to be split, it made economic sense to blue-print it. (The machining work which that process requires amounted to less than £400). It would have been silly not to go the extra mile. The additional tuning work to the heads which produced the red meat of the performance gains were entirely down to the judgement of Rich and and the two Chris's. I told them I wanted punch and aggression. A hard edged road bike, nothing sanitised, but a road bike all the same and a reliable one, not a track tool. I listened to their advice and expensive after-market internals were ruled out on grounds of cost effectiveness and practicality. What they came up with were a set of finely judged modifications which gave me exactly what I asked for. In fact exceeded my expectations.
Trust me, none of the bike's original character has been lost. It has been enhanced. Its a purer version of the original.
Extraneous irritations have been tuned out and everything that was always great about it retained and turned up to 11.

 

Thanks for spotting the typo. Corrected. You're quite right, 11 it is.

 

They certainly are. Its back up there now having its 15000 miles service. The engine won't need much because the rebuild was done at 11200 but the belts are due. They didn't replace them at the time because there was absolutely nothing wrong with them and its handy to keep to the factory service intervals. The clutch will probably need replacing as well. Its quite graunchy, vibey and more clattery than usual. Rich recommends a Barnet basket with stainless fingers but Ducati plates. He rates that combination best so that's good enough for me.

The suspension upgrade has been done. Ohlins TTX on the back and a fork rebuild with K-Tech piston kit up front. Its miles better. I dropped the yokes down the forks 10mm and the suspension shop kept to that and they altered the ride height during the set-up. It doesn't steer like a sports 600 but its much more agile than it was and far less given to understeer. I can make micro adjustments to a line in a bend without the bike fighting me back. The front is less harsh and the back is lovely. No pitching, absolutely no wallowing but still feels compliant. I can feel more of the road surface. Its not harsh, just more sensitive, like I'm running a thinner tyre carcase. Its a good thing, gives more feedback from the tyre. I got the shock and piston kit fitted and a full setup for a ride in/ride out price of £1600. I can't complain about that. Money well spent.
I do now have a hankering for some BST carbon wheels... . And so it goes on...