I'm rebuilding a Condor A350, so I thought I better sign up to all the relevant forums I could find. I know it's not a 'true' Ducati, but it has a Ducati engine at least, and that is certainly the part causing the most consternation at the moment!
I bought it a year or so ago, not having had anything to do with Ducati's before I wasn't sure what to expect, so I just did some basic servicing on it, plenty of fresh oil and so on and just rode it everywhere.
Anyway, on the way home one day at the end of last summer it seized solid on me, fortunately I was only going around 20mph. I'm a university student, so I decided to bring the engine back with me and rebuild it in my spare time.
Yes, that is my bedroom. Don't tell the letting agency!
Anyway, the head and cylinder slid off without an issue, worrying in a way as the bottom half looks the more expensive.
I had loosened most of the tough looking nuts with the engine still in the frame, but I had forgotten the nut retaining the output sprocket. Anyway, I tried undoing that and all of a sudden the piston poked its head out of the crankcase. I don't know why it chose that moment to 'unseize', I had had quite a good go at it earlier. Anyway, it confirmed it was definitely the big end that had gone.
There are shards of metal all over the inside of the engine, the remains of the big end. Presumably what has caused that scoring of the piston. Anyway, I carried on disassembling it, the flywheel put up quite a fight, but with the correct puller and the help of a friend sitting on the engine, it eventually let go.
So that's about the extent of it so far. Chris Bushell has split the crank shaft for me (I can't quite fit a hydraulic press in my bedroom), and I have a new rod kit to be fitted, hopefully this week some time. I have a 0.2mm oversize piston to fit, as the scoring on the old one was quite severe. Other than that I'm just fitting new bearings everywhere, new gaskets and seals etc. I haven't inspected the valves yet, but I'm hoping I can just get away with giving them a go with some grinding compound. The debris from the big end don't seem to have made it to the head at least, it must have seized fairly quickly when it disintegrated. I'm sure this is all very much 'par for the course' with an engine of this age, but I've never touched a Ducati before, and my only other bike experience is with mobylettes (and a wreck of a Honda), so this is quite a learning curve for me. Anyway, I hope people find the saga interesting, and perhaps can even point out when I am making stupid mistakes
.-George
. Just change the oil regularly and 'She'll be right'.
.
. As you're discovering, there's a lot of truth in the old engineer's axiom that "Oil is cheaper than bearings"