Ducati 900 SS |
More than any other Ducati, the 900SS recalls the roots of Bologna's success and rediscovers a niche in the marketplace long empty. -- Cycle Magazine, 1991 |
Pics & basic info...
'91 was the first year for this style of SS and with small changes and updates, its basic platform carried on until the FE of '98. Depending upon what figures one believes, around 4305 '91 models were built. (Although even that number is said to include many '92 versions that came along near the end of the year.) Of those, 255 came to the States and many (some say most) of these US bikes were immediately shipped to Japan to satisfy their healthy gray market demand. There's no way to know how many remained. I've tried to modify mine with an eye towards enhancing its original mission, as opposed to converting it into something it was never meant to be. More importantly, all stock pieces are intact and boxed up. The following is a list of the changes that have taken place over the years. Combined with the bike's basic charm, these tweaks have conspired to make this the very first motorcycle I've ever owned ... that I can't imagine ever wanting to sell.
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Various mechanical pics & miscellaneous comments...
The picture in the upper left shows the sprocket carrier half of Marchesini's ingenious cush drive system. Notice the oversized heads on the ends of the bolts that secure the sprocket? These heads serve to engage the rim's cush drive bushings. It's a small but important part of the wheelset's weight saving equation and just one of the details that makes these wheels so tasty. Here are the ACTUAL weights of the magnesium Marchesinis for the sizes shown. I weighed all this myself. The wheels are compared sans rotors. The rears were weighed with cush drives & sprockets (both alloy) since they both use proprietary stuff there. I also weighed the cush drives separately, in case anyone's interested in that. All bearings are in place... Stock Brembo 3.5 x 17 front: 11lbs,
3oz. Stock Brembo 5.5 x 17 rear with cush
& sprocket: 18lbs, 13oz. Stock Brembo cush drive with
sprocket: 3lbs, 3 oz. In "bang for the buck" terms, the light wheels are off the scale. They transform the bike and should rate high on any enthusiast's to-do list. The next picture shows the lightened rear rotor. It's the handiwork of my friend Randy Porter and I think it's a nice touch. Interested? Give him a ring at his shop, Lonestar Metalwerx, 713-465-6552. While we're on the topic of weight loss, I'll take the time to mention the lightened engine internals that make it rev NOW. Here are the weights of some of the engine's major components... Stock 92mm piston & wrist pin:
485 grams. Stock rod w/bolts: 490 grams each. Stock flywheel: 1,889 grams. Stock clutch basket: 1,174 grams. Stock clutch hub: 1,168 grams. Stock pressure plate: 295 grams. Stock clutch plates & shims:
1,476 grams. Bear in mind that all this is rotating weight. Including the crank mods, we figure the engine has shed just over 12 pounds of internal spinning fat. The results are nothing short of remarkable. Not just in terms of the engine's behavior, but also in terms of handling. Why? Picture those 12 pounds in the form a large gyro spinning between your legs. Now imagine removing it. This thing is nimble. In the interest of valvetrain longevity, fat torque and driveability, we stayed with stock spec valves and cams. Looking at the headwork, you can see that it consists of nothing more than good old fashioned massaging by Kevin Stasny. The power increase speaks volumes about the quality and effectiveness of this relatively innocent looking work. Naturally the manifolds were treated with the same TLC and matched to the heads. Nichols clutch basket & kit parts...
As you can see from the first two pics, the kit basket is shot! It's also a tad shorter than the stock dimensioned Nichols and made to work with the matching lightweight kit hub. Making the Nichols work with the trick hub involved finding the right combination of driven & clutch plates and slightly spacing the slave cylinder away from the engine. Thanks to my friend Richard Strysniewicz for helping me solve this problem. Experiments in weightless batteries...
On the left you can see the SecureStart as purchased (under $100 from Sears). Inside its housing you'll find the battery pack shown in the second picture (an ignition key is included for scale). In this picture I've already added the cable ends needed to bolt up to the bike's wiring, which leads us to the third picture showing my simple installation within the stock battery tray. It's merely rubber padded and zip tied in place. The last picture shows the rudimentary charger I threw together. It consists of the standard SecureStart plug-in charger along with its internal circuit board mounted in a black plastic box from the local electrical supply. The board's output charges the battery via two simple alligator clipped leads. It'll usually need some charging for initial wake up and once lit, the bike's charging system has kept it charged during the rest of the day's ride. This is using the stock ('91 vintage) regulator and being a fair weather daytime toy, running with the lights off. Depending upon which full sized battery you use, this simple mod lops off over 10 lbs. Great stuff, but it requires fiddling. They don't tolerate heat very well and perhaps a location in the tail would be advised. I wouldn't recommend it for use on a daily driver as implementation of this technology in these applications is in its infancy. Long story short, if you decide to play around with such a setup, don't permanently modify any of your bike's wiring harness and keep the basic pieces in place so that the stock battery can be tossed in if needed. This is NOT an install & forget affair. Hidden rear blinkers...
The middle picture shows the existing niches for the Life Bright LEDs on either side of the stock tail/brake light. They're easily secured using two-sided tape and a small zip-tie. Wiring is a snap as well. I added some barrel connectors to their wiring that simply plugged into the bike's stock harness. They draw so little current that they flash rather fast, but this can easily be resistored down if desired. Thinking that a faster rate of flash only makes 'em more obvious, I left it as is for now. I then carefully trimmed a donor rear fender and ended up with one very tidy looking SS hinder...
A word of caution ... If you do a lot of commuting where signaling is a life or death thing every waking moment, these aren't likely the way to go as it has to be said that they're substantially less noticeable to your average asleep-at-the-wheeler. On the bright side (literally), the tiny LEDs are inexpensive and because they draw hardly any current, it'd be very easy to hide a couple more outside of the lens, say on the fender sides. |
The latest poop... 5-2-01 ... I've always liked black wheels. In fact, the '91 SS came new with white ones and I had 'em powder coated black in '92. When it came Marchesini time a few years ago, gold was all they had available at the time. So I put 'em on and they looked OK. I figured to run 'em for a bit, then change the color. All was well till I put some black Marchesinis on the 888 and kept looking at 'em side by side till I just couldn't take it anymore. Here's how the SS looked shortly thereafter...
The missing wheels were off to the painters! They're back now and look great. The T.A.W. folks were kind enough to send some new Marchesini decals for the rims' edges and I also went ahead and spooned on some fresh Michelin Pilots. Also, the EBC rotors had worked great for years, but I'd long wanted to make the entire system Brembo using their rotors on gold carriers. (Vain huh?) I considered some tasty race Brembos I'd fondled at Jeff Nash's little Ducati candy store, but the cost was prohibitive and they're overkill for Pace riding anyway. So a call to T.A.W. turned up a set of Brembo's latest street rotors. They're the new stainless floaters on gold anodized aluminum carriers.
Marginally lighter than the EBCs, they look more at home with the newly blackened wheels and the other widgets on the bike. Have a gander at the finished product...
Once our lives have recovered from the adventures of building a house, I'll post a bunch more properly staged & updated pics. |
Some exhausting thoughts... As many of you know, after the engine re-do, the exhaust system started out as an experiment consisting of a Staintune 2into1 header plumbed into a Vance & Hines oval section YZF-1000 muffler. Despite being far from broken in or dialed in at the time, the first dyno pull delivered over 90hp with the quiet street baffle installed. That's 23% more than the bike produced box stock. Even better, torque went through the roof as well. Excellent results. I then installed a competition baffle that freed the motor noticeably, particularly on top. So, even without serious dialing and before things were fully broken in, it looked as if the 2into1 thing was going to work fine. Still, we couldn't help but think that a proper big bore exhaust system would benefit this particular combo, so I decided to try an interesting single sided full Arrow racing exhaust system. As luck would have it, the one I bought had a slightly missbent rear pipe and being a semi-one-off backdoor import, I was stuck and no one in Texas wanted to tackle tweaking its expensive stainless tubes. Enter Bruce of BCM. He read a mention of this that I'd posted to the Ducati list and graciously offered to have Doug over at BCD Fabrication tweak it right. It's in their hands as this is typed. Thanks guys! Anyway ... While I'm still interested to try out the funky Arrow system, I ran across another that I couldn't pass up. It's a Termignoni "spaghetti" system and it bolted right up. Well, it bolted up after I installed the DP rearsets ... this thing is tucked up & high! Suffice it to say that this engine loves this exhaust system. It lost nothing on the bottom, yet picked up a bit of midrange and few hundred more (rarely) usable rpm up top. Once BCD finishes perfecting my full Arrow system, I'll give it a go and see how well it works in comparison. On a related note ... Carl Marshall is the former owner of this Termignoni system and I ran across his ad in the classifieds at Bob Cowin's excellent Ducati Index. A public thanks for your honesty, candor and the fair deal Carl. It's folks like you and transactions like this that make this whole WWW thing such a valuable & enjoyable resource. |
Ahem... |
A little nostalgia... Anyway, in the same neighborhood, there was a guy with a few motorcycles. We'd shred by his place and gander over at his garage with curiosity. Later, we'd wonder aloud about what it was that he saw in his chosen motorcycles. Eventually, we visited him and struck up a friendship. He must've thought we were a real sight with all our 4into1s, flat slides, etc, but was nice enough to let us hang out. He always had a strange satisfaction regarding his stable, yet never treated us like the punk kids that we were. His bikes? Well ... he had a '73 850 Norton Commando and '79 900SS, both of which he'd bought new. Matter of fact, the Norton was his first streetbike. If memory serves, there was a Triumph something or other in there too. At first I thought it strange that with all the power available in bikes like my CB-900F, he would choose to own such antiques. After all, Freddie rode an F! Here's a guy who owns some stuff he never intends to sell! How strange! Silly me. Silly, silly me. Over time I grew to really want that %$#@ SS! (Still do.) It sounded awesome, pulled like a freight train and had a strange air about it that none of our rockets could approach. This thing was special in a funky, simple kinda way. I knew back then that I'd one day have something that reeked the same aura. Lots of other wonderful Oriental stuff filled my garage after that 900F. Still, I always knew I'd one day get one of those Italian widgets. Then, in '91 my friend Dave showed up with his dealer tagged SS. The rest is history... Even after all these years, this one remains a keeper. While others call Ducati's perceived lack of quality and peculiar nature "character", I have to say that my SS's quality and reliability have been exemplary. Frankly, I don't see it as an issue at all. This doesn't mean that I don't like the "other stuff". Switching off with friends who ride all the latest big bore Japanese bikes is a real joy. Love the four valve Ducatis as well. After all, they rightfully enjoy the world's praise. Even bought one recently, albeit an older 888. Sigh ... but there's just something about these little two valvers. Maybe it's the user-friendly power, the thick midrange (Especially now!), the ease with which they can be tweaked to suit our personal tastes, the satisfaction of being a bit different, the charm of things Italian ... Does it matter? And what about the old neighbor? He remains a very dear friend to this day. Yep, Phil Dansby (AKA, Captain Commando) still owns those bikes and has in fact added some very tasty treats to his wonderful stable. A Rickman framed Triumph, another killer Norton and a Beemer RS. These days the Captain runs a restaurant with a gearhead theme just outside of Dallas, called Up N Smoke. (Check my Links page to pay it a visit.) I hope to one day have half the goodies he does. For now, I'm content to share his satisfaction with machines others view as "peculiar". Click here to see Phil at his best! BTW, if it suits ya, follow this link to read about my being reeled in by the new SS at the British bike rally in New Ulm, Texas, way back in '91. You'll also find some vintage pics taken when picking up & opening the crate. |
Extremely lightweight and torquey, there's hardly another sportbike like the Ducati 900SS. Or another more fun over a gnarled mountain pass. -- Cycle Magazine, 1991 |
Related links & contact info... |
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Since 5-7-98 ... |
Powerbronze twin headlamp fairing.
Hindsight bar-end mirror.
