[safetyfish]

Hope this never happens to you,

Finally came round to open the bike and replace a suspected broken starter motor. Imagine my surprise when I took the left casing cover off and found this....

The bike was running fine on the day it gave up the ghost. From when I started to get weird speedo readings until I pulled over to check what was going on was a good 10 miles. When I pulled over, the bike refused to start again. I really can not imagine why that was by looking at the pictures

I Emailed Ducati Italy to show them this strange mechanical failure, hopefully they will be nice and kind enough to pass on a replacement 999R crankshaft out of the goodness of their hearts. rest of the engine internals so far looks OK, holding thumbs but all of the bearings will need replacing due to the fragments that did travel around the casing.

SF

 

[yellow blur]

Holy shit dude!!1…That TOTALLY sucks…….. Sorry to see that -- and I’m pissing on a known issue --flaking rockers…!!
Good Luck and I’m sure Ducati will be taking care of you in short order..!!!! Find a complete engine and swap er out……

 

[jwsparkes]

Fatigue in my opinion. You can see the beach marks of the crack growth. Then, when residual strength was insufficient, viola - fracture.

Caused for sure from a poor finish on the machining, a notch or some other stress concentrating feature in the geometry. If Ducati give you greif, point this out to them.

 

[tye1138]

WOW holy shit!

I'd like to know how bad the case bearings are before making a judgement call on how it happened. How does the generator inner coil look?

Also, has the bike been crashed on that side before?

 

[safetyfish]

Bike has had a lowside onto its right before, but luckily I was underneath the bike when it happened so not much damage

So far in the disassembling it all looks good. If time allows I will be splitting the cases tomorrow. Just not sure how to do it because the normal procedure will not work.

SF

 

[pjonte]

Fatigue in my opinion. You can see the beach marks of the crack growth. Then, when residual strength was insufficient, viola - fracture.

Caused for sure from a poor finish on the machining, a notch or some other stress concentrating feature in the geometry. If Ducati give you greif, point this out to them.

++1 - classic.. ask any mechanical engineer.

 

[Da_Bull]

I HOPE that Ducati comes to the rescue ... but I wouldn't bank on it. It's such an "old design" that they may not even want to try and reverse engineer the failure.

All that said (and I'm sorry for the negativity) I see this as the perfect opportunity to contact NCR or Ferraci and see if they have a crank for your bike. YOWZA!!! Now THAT would kick ass.

 

[corndog67]

Don't say anything about that lowside on the right side. In fact, I would delete that reference in this thread, and if you want, I'll delete this also. Don't cop to nothin'.

 

[BrianG]

Don't say anything about that lowside on the right side. In fact, I would delete that reference in this thread, and if you want, I'll delete this also. Don't cop to nothin'.

Yup, no sense being straight about it................

 

[migrane]

DAMN !!!! WTF !!!!

They must have made that shaft when they did my transmission !!!!

What kind of issues do you foresee with splitting the cases ?!?! As long as you can get everything cleared away from that side of the engine and the shaft will slide through the bearing I dont see a problem.

Migrane ...