I made this after becoming sick of the worn out original hydraulic unit. It's a half inch wider than original, uses a ZX10R cable, Zeta flight lever and perch, pressure plate is a slice of 4130 Chromoly bar fitted to the original plate. The fork is stainless steel pivoting in stainless bearings at the base and release bearing was $20 from some marine application, which is guided on a 1" mild steel bar spigot bolted through the cover. The actuator is stainless with a needle roller bearing inside and the gold chain is a few links of Charge Masher half link left over from my mountain bike. Nearly 1700 miles on the unit now, works great. Very happy, I can finally pull up to a stop and engage neutral with no fuss :smile:
If Im not mistaken, its a pre '91 SS? If so, I can see why you have done that rather than repair the stock setup. For those not in the know, on the earlier bikes the slave cyclinder is located in the clutch cover, and not over the other side of the bike like all the later ones, its a similar set up on dry clutch 750ss bikes like mine. The thrust bearing sits on the slave piston, and with all the friction material flying around wears out quite rapidly, and correct me if Im wrong, but new ones aren't available? The bore of the slave cylinder wears too, as its cast into the clutch cover, its not too clever. Ive often thought of doing something similar with my dry clutch engine, but because its such a period piece, I think that its probably better to persevere with something a little more stock looking? I would probably investigate over boring the slave cylinder, and sleeving, or maybe making up a larger piston, depending on what sort of sealed thrust bearing I could source. Lots of aggro to ressurect a not particularly good bit of Ducati engineering.
It's a 1990 model bike. It was a grey import that must've been stored in a shallow pool for a while. The original slave (which is unavailable new), was full of water and corroded. I spent ages and $$$ on trying to repair or rework the hydraulic slave. Over bored it and had the piston metal sprayed: fail. Looked at having the bore sleeved, but the engineer who specialises in that work said he would do it but no guarantees. Basically the problem is: the bore is only 19mm deep and 26mm dia. There's not enough material for the sleeve to grip on to, and Rob's concern was when the case warmed up, it might be enough to hydraulic the sleeve straight back out when the clutch was engaged. Add the cost of that work to $400 NZD for a new piston and a wait while Ducati made it, on top of what I'd already spent and I was losing interest immediately. Everything I've done here is reversible. Even the original button on the pressure plate is still there under the new Chromo one. The entire unit is separate to the bike as you can see by me holding it. All work was done by myself, apart form the machining of certain parts which was carried out by my friend, Gary, who has a '95 900 SS intercooled turbo of his own doing. One of the biggest improvements is the size of the release bearing engagement area. The original piston has a 19mm thrust face, the new one is 40mm. Now the pressure plate stays flat when engaged, when previously it would wobble around causing the piston to do the same in its bore. I tried to get the finished look of the cover roughly similar to original. But I wasn't trying to copy it. Reliability was what I wanted as I'm a single parent without the necessary funds to pay someone else to design and build something like this. Now I have a Ducati that I don't have to switch off everytime I get to a stop sign or red light so I can get the damn thing into neutral. That so used to do my head in...:frown:
well done, you can always rely on a Kiwi for ingenuity, must be something to do with being so far from anywhere else. Prettiest (read horribly expensive) solution I've seen was this from a German tuning chap who's name I''ve forgotten.
