1200 1200 Engine Strip - Anyone Done This ?

Finally got chance to look at the bike this week.
The front plug was very oily, as was the exhaust port, so decided to just strip that cylinder.
Head and barrel is now off.
There is a section of the piston top missing.

The head and valves look unmarked, as do the valve seats. there are no marks on the piston crown either.
The bore looks remarkably clean, but there are a few marks I can catch with a finger nail. Not deep, but possibly all it takes to burn a bit of oil ?

I havent checked the valve clearances. the exhaust valve's are tight in the seats, but I can rotate the inlet valves, which makes me question whether the closing clearances are correct.

So definitely a new piston required, and probably replate the bore.

In order to change the big end shells (which I want to do) I need to remove the other cylinder.
Anyone know what the different colour coded shell thicknesses are, and whether the cranks marked to show which ones ?

Cheers,
John.

 

Just thought I would update this post, now the bike is back together.

I took the decision that I wanted to replace the shells, to ensure I caught any damage that may have happened to them (its common to suspect they could be bruised if something gets squashed between the piston and head, leading to early failure of them not long after rebuild).
I therefore removed the engine from the bike, and then the rear head and barrel. The rear barrel had a slight mark on the lower sleeve, but nothing like the front cylinder.

Parts were passed to Snells who have been excellent in this whole process.
Ducati agreed to supply both barrels and pistons at a discounted 'good will' price. The workshop manual suggests both barrels and pistons should be replaced together.

I had intended to do the rebuild myself, but it soon became evident that its not quite so straight forward when you get to things like needing to shim the crank, and specialist tools are used to do some things. After a bit of head scratching I therefore elected to hand over the engine to Snells for them to do the strip and complete rebuild.
Having done the rebuild, Tom the mechanic told me the engine shows very little sign of wear (I had seen no signs from what I could see of the front of the gears), and the clutch was well within spec. When I checked the valve clearances they were all at the bottom of the tolerance, which he confirmed too.

To be honest I was expecting to see far more signs of wear on the shells, and from the pictures of the mains posted under the broken crank thread, expected them to be bad too, but they look like new.

Undoubtedly I could have bought a s/h engine for less than the rebuild cost, but that would be an unknown quantity. I now have a rebuilt engine with essentially 0 miles on it, and all parts confirmed to be in good condition, plus a warranty on the work.

I appreciate some may see this as scare mongering, but I am trying here to show the other side of this, that despite the piston problem the engine shows very little signs of wear at 27k miles.
I don't ride my bike for commuting every day, but do 6k to 8k miles a year of trips, generally two up and fully loaded, and at pace, so it gets well used but not abused.

Roll on the next 27k miles, and more

 

Hi Richard,
No not really, it is still unclear. There are no marks on the piston crown or the head / valve heads, and there is no valve lip or seat damage, just a bit of carbon scraped off of one of the stems where the bit has presumably gone out.
I found nothing in the bottom of the crankcases and neither did Tom when he split them either. He stripped the oil pump and blew out all oil ways but found nothing.
After the event the bike was running fine, just smoked a bit, and sounded a little top endy at 7k and above, so I kept the revs down.

All I would say is the bike sounded a bit more top-endy than usual prior to this trip, such that I thought the clearances might have needed doing when it got to 30k miles. As it was they were actually fine and I would therefore suspect this might have been piston wear. I couldn't feel any movement in the little end, and these weren't changed.
It had an oil and filter prior to leaving for the trip, so was on fresh oil (couple of k miles max when it happened).
By contrast the bike sounds very quiet mechanically speaking, now (it needs running in again yet though).

I have got all parts removed so I could measure them if I can be arsed. What did surprise me was the clearance in the bore, and the ability for the piston to tilt a bit in the bore, even with the new one I have (I bought the new one from the USA mentioned earlier in the thread but haven't used it, so will move it on at some point).