Slow Monster rebuild

[the lodger]

I don't think WD40 is recommended for ignition barrels or any kind of electrical switch with contacts. I can't remember why exactly but may be because as it dries it gums up the works ( sorry that's not very helpful ) . Anyway I use a graphite powder in a puff bottle , which is designed to lubricate the mechanical side of locks. Cheap as chips for a large bottle which will last forever and you can amuse yourself by going round your house and vehicles , and lubricating everything you have that has a key.

[Darren69]

Graphite conducts electricity so probably not the best thing to put in electrical switches as it could build up. Oil is not recommended for regular locks because it can attract dirt.

[Mr Gazza]

The RAF use Graphite bombs to cause severe disruption to electrical installations such as power stations. It has the advantage of low collateral damage, not needing high explosive, and not damaging equipment beyond what a jolly good clean will fix.. Just a ruddy nuisance for a while that's all. (and enough in most cases.)

You can also sabotage annoying radios in the workplace.. Not that I would ever do such a thing! A pencil line on the porcelain of a spark plug from base to terminal will also stop it working, much to the amusement of certain apprentices!

[Darren69]

Yea, if you've been putting graphite in your ignition switch I would give it a good clean out with electrical contact cleaner such as Brightspark to get all the graphite out. WD40 used sparingly should be fine, it;s what I've always used.

[the lodger]

Points taken but I should explain I put a little puff of graphite on the key and not in the ignition barrel. I will get some of that contact cleaner though so thanks for the name. It's something I've never had to hand and probably should.

[utopia]

Originally Posted by 350TSS

..... then parted it off at 2.5 mm forming a 5.5mm top hat section. I say parted it off what I actually did was mark it with the parting off tool and left the lathe running with a hacksaw settled in the mark and cut them off that way.

I would very strongly council you against such practices.

A lathe is very unforgiving if something goes wrong and your hand held tool were to jam in the workpiece, or you should slip while applying pressure and fall towards the lathe.
I have seen the results of similar accidents and it ain't pretty.
Furthermore, working on your own there is nobody around to come to the rescue and switch off the machine.
Much more sensible to bite the bullet and laboriously hacksaw your way through the bar by hand, then turn around and skim the back face.
Parting off never gives a good flat face anyway so a skim on the back is always a good idea.

Originally Posted by the lodger

I don't think WD40 is recommended for ignition barrels or any kind of electrical switch with contacts. I can't remember why exactly but may be because as it dries it gums up the works ( sorry that's not very helpful ) .

Too right! WD40 contains oils that dry to a resin, which is exactly what you don't want in anything electrical. The best treatment is ACF50, which kills corrosion, and lubricates but does not conduct electricity. Dielectric is the term. It creeps extremely well too, so gets to all parts. Only downside is it will creep out of connectors and collect dust, but better a bit of muck on the outside and pristine internals than the other way around!

Nick

[Ron1000]

+1 ACF50. Great stuff

Following build with interest

[350TSS]

Today I spent about 4 hours on the electrics, I am going through every circuit one by one and drawing a circuit diagram for that individual circuit noting the position of the wires within the connectors and the various colours of each wire in that circuit and then testing continuity. Tedious work but I did find a bad AMP connection from the LH switch.
My biggest problem is that I really do not know what I am doing, particularly circuits entering or leaving the MU unit as I have no idea how it actually works or the circuit logic within it. For example, there are two poles, in and out, labelled "Horn", using a 9v test probe, battery disconnected and ignition off, I get 5v across these two poles and 9v with the ignition switched on, battery disconnected ????
I think my estimated time for completing the wiring is looking decidedly dodgy.

Bored with that I spent the next 2 hours machining titanium bar for the gear linkage rod (10mm bar wasted to 8 mm for all but 20 mm at either end, drilled 5mm to take a 6mm thread) and for the rear brake torque arm. This will be made in three pieces, mainly because I did not have any titanium bar 430mm long. I could make it in one piece out of 12 or 15 mm aluminium bar but I do not think it will be as strong as the titanium design I envisage.
At either end will be a 12 mm diameter bar 97mm long drilled both ends 7 mm to take an 8mm thread for the spherical bearing. A 230mm length of 10mm bar has been turned down for 25mm at each end to 8 mm to thread into the 12mm bar. I am still waiting for my LH taps and LH spherical bearings to turn up so I could not complete either the gear linkage rod or the torque arm.

The machining of the titanium did nothing for the grumbling bearing on the lathe so I took that apart. I was hoping to find a worn-out ball race that could be instantly identified and re-newed. What I found was that the drive pulley to the electric motor was without its drive key fitted to the keyed shaft, a bit surprised it worked at all.
When I took the idler pulley off, the one I think was making all the noise, 5 x 3/16 ball bearings closely followed by some springs went pinging in all directions, most of which will never be seen again. Worst the idler pulley rotates on a pair of very thin-walled bronze bushes which are a) imperial sizes and b) obviously specials that I will need the lathe to make.
The bearing supporting the chuck is still good so if I can find some suitable springs and a few 3/16 ball bearings I can reassemble the lathe to make the necessary bushes.

[350TSS]

Whilst awaiting parts for the electrics and bushes and ball bearings and key shaft steel to fix the lathe, I got on with what I could today.
It started badly, the 6 and 8 mm LH taps arrived so I tried to thread one end of the gear linkage rod LH and after about an hour had only managed to bore out one end to about 7 mm for about 6 mm. The tap just would not start. I used the chuck from the lathe to centre the shaft to be tapped but the tap would not hold firmly enough in the drill chuck at the other end. A 6mm x 1mm thread is quite fine and each time I thought I had a start it just stripped out with the next half-turn of the chuck.
I will need to reface the end of the gear linkage rod and try again but for that, I need a working lathe.
I had more success with the rear brake torque arm. I still need the LH lock nut for the caliper end and I think I want to shorten the overall length by about 10 mm.



The routeing of the rear brake pipe will be a bit of a challenge as the brake pipe though described as a flexible pipe is actually very rigid and I think the rear brake caliper will move about 30mm with suspension movement. Routed as is, inside the hugger, there is quite a big risk the brake pipe will scuff the tyre. Outside the hugger will look odd/ugly but I may have no choice. I will check to see if I have some rubber rear hoses (from a Suzuki or Kawasaki) that would be a bit more flexible.

I had a go at upholstering the seat, which came out OK (just about). The picture was taken before I ironed out all the creases so it now looks a bit better than the picture (but not much). The ribs are cut from self-adhesive 20 mm wide window sealer. After I had glued it down I wished I had feathered the edges with a sanding disc as the right angles cause the ambla to not adhere to contours in a consistent way. It will do to get the bike on the road, maybe I will get it professionally re-covered over next winter.

[350TSS]

I just reviewed my ETTC which is down to 51 hours, 23 of which is finishing the electrics (but which is probably an underestimate given my level of incompetence at electrickery), 17 hours is accounted for with painting the tank, seat and fly-screen and the remainder is general assembly, fitting and bleeding brake pipes, bleeding clutch, buying and fitting number plate, changing the oil filter and filling with oil then a check over and torque down of all bolts and finally getting an MOT.

[350TSS]

After a few days messing about with the wiring, I came to the conclusion that a radical re-work was required. There were a number of reasons for this, first, the AMP connectors I made up earlier were not standing up to connection, disconnection and re-connection, second the space that they took up was not real estate that I had spare, third, the use of the heavier gauge wire on a number of circuits was also space constraining and worse the sub looms were not at all flexible.

I also challenged the logic for the heavier gauge wiring, there are only two really significant loads on the bike, the headlamp and the horn. If I use an LED headlamp bulb that load will be at least halved and the horn is only used intermittently (never in my case) so the heavier gauge wiring is redundant. I have used heavy gauge for the earth and for the main power leads through the fuse to the MU unit, the alternator power leads and the battery to the starter solenoid.

I ordered an ABS electronics box from CPC after puzzling over the smallest but still adequate sized one for the job. It is bolted to the back of the CF instrument surround via a thrust bearing so it can rotate when the handlebars move.
The instrument surround is rubber-mounted so I do not think vibration will be a significant problem. Two domestic strip connectors are each bolted by 3 mm SS mushroom head socket screws to the base of the box which is reinforced on the reverse side by a 3 mm aluminium plate. The lower strip connector is raised by a standoff made from a strip of 10 mm plate with a space cut between the retaining bolt centres to allow the wires exiting the upper strip connector to get to the lower exit points in the box (there are 8 exit points in all).
Modifying the box and getting this far with the wiring took nearly 8 hours, although some of that was cogitating about cutting off the AMP connectors.
I am replacing every wire leaving the connection box with thin wall 1 mm wire (the same size wire that comes out of all the Ducati specified switches). This has had an enormous effect on the size of the bundle that has to go around the headstock - reducing it to about 30% of the previous wiring and it is significantly more flexible.

There are still a number of hours work left to complete this, rewiring all the connections to the MU unit and marrying the remaining wires to the back loom which I will not replace but I feel much more confident a) it can be done and b) it was the right thing to do.






ui

[350TSS]

A quick update - some good news and some less so.
Wiring is continuing but slowly, the connection box behind the instrument panel got buttoned up and I moved to tidying-up the wiring behind the headstock, replacing all the runs around the headstock with thinner gauge wire.

A bit late now but I spent ages creating a spreadsheet so I could record all the circuits and their wire colours, to and from each connection. As most will know the wire colours on the Ducati wiring diagram bear only a passing resemblance to the actual loom, particularly when the loom joins switches etc. I have made the problem worse by using an aftermarket instrument panel with 14 different coloured wires coming from it and because I was not able to find wires with multiple colours (red with green trace or blue with white trace etc) I have compounded the issue.

About 15 wires that leave the MU unit need to be connected to wires that go to the tail light, the brake light switches, the instrument panel, the neutral switch etc. and I struggled to find a way to do it that was a) not absorbing lots of real estate that I do not have and b) so that it looked neat.
Two wires have multiple connections and it is really these that have caused me to go down a connection box route as it is/would be very difficult to make them neat and not excessively space absorbing.

In most cases, it is a case of the wire leaving the MU unit joining a wire that goes fore and aft of the unit and I spent ages on the internet trying to find connection boxes that are small enough and neat enough to work. Having no luck there I decided to make my own so I ordered a range of suitably sized ABS enclosures (not here yet) and robbed the brass pins from three-pin plugs to convert to connection blocks. These will all have to be insulated from each other within the boxes as they will all be on the live side of the circuits. I can see the way forward but there is a lot of work to make it all fit in.

The bad news is that my headlamp shell clashes with the connection box behind the instrument panel and although I considered cutting another flat on the shell to provide clearance if I do so, the lens will not fit inside the headlamp shell. I have ordered an LED headlamp which has a much slimmer profile (45mm) than the standard lens, the downsides of this are: a) that it is only available in 7" and my shell and the hole cut in the front of the flyscreen are for an 8" headlamp and b) it is black and ugly.
The first is solvable one way or another, the second I am stuck with.

Having re-considered the load (wind pressure) that the flyscreen may impose on the top mounts (the instrument panel surround) I have decided I need to brace the instrument surround. I have a plan here and the parts are on order.

The final downside issue is that the Fastbikegear hall effect ignition system I bought 2 years ago came with a CD which I think contains the manual and the wiring diagram and in particular how to interconnect with the Ignitech ignition module. Since buying the kit I have had to replace all the computers in the house as they have expired (one spectacularly when the power supply exploded) none of the replacements contains a CD drive, so I have not the first clue how to wire the ignition triggers to the Ignitech unit, the coils or the interface with the rev counter.

Accidentally I found out that the starter motor works, I dropped a 10 mm socket and it shorted out the solenoid connections and the engine cranked over about 5 turns before I could displace it.

[Darren69]

Regarding CD drive. I got one of these when mine packed up. Seems ok so far: -

https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-SDRW-0...s%2C205&sr=8-3

[slob]

I’m a bit baffled by your approach to your wiring.
Surely robbing brass from plugs and working out how to insulate is just reinventing the choc-blocs you’ve used up front. Also while these may help during testing your loom, wouldn’t crimp or soldered connections be smaller, lighter and more reliable for the finished article?