Last night I was riding along without a care in the world when the bike (2004 S4R) suddenly just died without any warning as I was powering off a roundabout onto a slip road. No coughs or splutters or gradual loss of power. - just one minute it was fine then suddenly it was kaput. It turns over but won't fire. I've taken the timing covers off and the belts seem fine. There's nothing sticking out of the crank cases that should be inside them. I suspect it's an electrical issue because while the fuel pump primes (or at least it buzzes and there's loads of fuel in the tank) and the engine turns turns over, even when I spray loads of Easy Start into the airbox it doesn't even try to fire up. I also pulled the plug lead off the rear cylinder and fitted a plug but I don't seem to have a spark though it was difficult to tell because the battery was pretty flat by that time and was struggling to even crank the engine. I haven't pulled the spark plug but instead nicked the one from my DT175 to use for the test because I can't get a long reach plug socket on the hex of the plug. 17mm seems too small and 19mm won't fit in the hole. What size socket does it take? IIRC I once had to grind the walls of a socket down in order to be able to fit it down a hole in order to get on the plug but I can't remember what bike that was. I haven't tried the front cylinder spark plug yet because I wasn't able to get the plug cap off without stressing the wire so I need to undo the the oil cooler in order to create more space before I have a go at that. However, I suspect that it will be as dead as the rear cylinder or else it should have ignited the Easy Start. The fuses in the little holder on the OS of the bike are all intact. Thoughts? Thanks.
If memory serves correctly, the antenna wire for the immobiliser is in the plastic housing over the ignition key, these have been known to drop out of position, might be worth a look
Unless things have changed, this won't have made the bike stop the first time it happened though, the immobiliser serves it's purpose at the initial start but is redundant as soon as engine running.
^ true that. spark and fuel bud. spark easy enough, fuel a tad harder. you can use a 501 bulb as a noid light. bend the pins back and fire it into your injector plugs loom side. it should flash during cranking.
Always worth checking the two mini-relays to the rhs of the battery. In fact, worth upgrading them from 20 to 30 amp while you're there...
Not yet unfortunately. I contacted Steve Cooper but unfortunately he doesn't think the ECU can be reflashed. I did a couple of hours Google research and found some (hopefully) helpful forum posts, a few of which said that Avanti Race Parts could do it, so I emailed them on Monday and am waiting for a reply. As the clocks are probably scrap due to water ingress it's going to need doing anyway so that seems to be the most sensible start point for the process of elimination. Edit: just realised that as we've also been discussing the problem in the 996 sub-forum rather than here, most of that info may mot make much sense. The background to how/why we think it might be an immobiliser issue requiring the reflashing of the ECU is here: https://www.ducatiforum.co.uk/threads/996-dead.88759/
Guy who runs that I think was on here for a while, antonye is his normal handle. Worth giving luigimoto a call as he will know what can and can’t be flashed. He’s only down the M5 from you
That's really useful info. Thanks. I see Antoye's Instagram posts on a fairly regular basis so I'll DM him today.
