Plus Ça Change (Tweaking Part II)

Categories: Bikes Diary Reviews Tech

I've had my Multistrada for just over a month now – time enough to find out the good, the bad and the incomprehensible about it. And yes, it IS as good as the reviews say it is (my own full review has been much-delayed by the simple fact that I've been out riding it!) but it ain't entirely perfect, so here's my thoughts to date on what can be improved in future and what needs to be fixed by Ducati right now. It's a very short list, considering that this is a brand new bike designed to appeal to a much wider market than Ducatis of yore – and, by definition, a market less accommodating of Italian, ah, idiosyncrasies. But here they are, in all their ignominy – let's see what Ducati come back with:

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Tweaking (Part I)

Categories: Bikes Diary Reviews Tech

Whilst my natural inclination with a new bike is to start fiddling with its setup pretty much on the way out of the dealers, with The Raven I've been giving myself time to slowly get used to it, to play with the various suspension modes and generally suss it out until I understand it enough to start prodding at it. That does however assume that Ducati have pretty much got everything right to the point where, whilst I might want to tweak to taste, there's nothing I can't live with. So time to look at the figures.

The graphs below show the electronically adjustable bits of the system and the stock settings for each mode and load (for the Preload settings, the higher the number the greater the preload and, for damping, the higher the number the 'lower' the damping effect). Whilst there's a mostly logical progression - increasing rear preload and commensurate increases, particularly to rebound damping as the load rises, there are a few anomalies in various modes that I'm still trying to work out. Also, rear damping is jumped right up in Two-Up+load in Sport mode - a bigger difference between any other mode and we're finding that Touring mode is generally a little undersprung and damped and Sport mode slightly overdamped. I've a feeling that the rear shock might need respringing - I probably weigh a tad more than the target Italian norm...

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Butting In…

Categories: Bikes Tech

The Ducati STx bikes have pretty good seats. For a Ducati. That actually doesn't do them justice – several 500 mile-plus days without major pain, loss of feeling or feelings of self-flagellation have demonstrated that. However, to be picky, the side ridges of the rider's perch can start digging into the inner thigh after a few hundred miles, and one 600-mile two-up epic revealed a few, ah, points of discomfort for my uncomplaining pillion – it wasn't anything she said as much as the very fine John Wayne impression she did on dismounting. So several alternatives presented themselves: the buy-in, from Corbin or Sargent, a new model year Ducati OEM seat (they're distinctly plusher on the butt) or the full custom route.

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Braking and Banjos

Categories: Tech

In an earlier post, I mentioned strange problems with a heavy judder under braking, something I've seen reported by a number of people in various fora. It's been a while, but we finally managed to find a solution. Even better, it's a very cheap and easy solution. I'd gotten as far as having the the head bearings changed, to little effect - they were rusted and badly worn (traditional on the STs, apparently, as Ducati don't seem to get around to greasing them at the factory), but not completely shagged – they would however only have lasted another few thousand miles. After that, I was looking at the fork slider bushes and the disks themselves – neither of them being cheap options.

The guys at Snell's, my local dealer, then got in touch with Ducati UK, who suggested trying the modified banjo assembly for the brake master cylinder that Ducati produced to address similar problems with some Multistradas. So we did, it was fitted this morning and all is now smooth as silk.

So, for anyone suffering from that dreaded judder under braking, one solution (YMMV) is a simple banjo kit: It's listed as a Multistrada part, number 69922861A. In my case, it was supplied and fitted under warranty, despite the bike being 18 months outside the warranty period. Result, and very impressed with both Snell's and Ducati UK.

How far? On a what?!

Categories: Bikes Tech

“You go touring. On a Ducati? – so where's the tow truck?” – if I'd had a quid (Eng. coll: unit of currency) for every time I'd heard that from fellow bikers, I'd be at least a couple of dozen cappucinos to the good. So here' we are, three years and 31,000 miles down the line, and me and the Stealth Bomber are not only still hanging around together, but doing very well – I haven't even managed to drop it yet, despite one panic-fuelled deadlift of 210kg – a strained muscle was self-healing, fairings aren't. So, 31,000 miles in three years, on a Ducati. Without a support vehicle? (remembering that the average annual mileage of a Ducati in the UK is 2,500) Er, yes actually, so it's probably worth a review of the score so far – let's see just how temperamental these 'fragile' Italian beasts really are. First, the vital statistics:

Number of breakdowns: 0.
Number of no-starts: 0.
Number of not-quite starts: 1 (cold day and dodgy battery - replaced under warranty).
Number of stops on-the-road: 0 (although a worn-out wheel bearing discovered at the Nurburgring caused some nervous twitching).

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State of the Art…

Categories: Bikes Diary Rants Reviews Rides Riding Tech

Bear with me, will you? I've been running this blog and site since late 1998 and have finally gotten around to migrating it all into my Two Worlds vServer engine, a set-up based on Movable Type content management system plus lots of other bits and pieces, held together with various hackettes (sorry, "ubiquity integration modules) in perl and php. Anyway, most of the raw content is across, but I'm still writing a few scripts to handle images and attachments, hence the sudden lack of photos, incriminating or otherwise. This will be completed very soon, at which point whatever passes for normal service will be resumed.

Richard

Browser compliance: ABM

Categories: Rants Tech

Here's an opinion: The Web is about being accessible to all –  it is not, nor should it be, the domain of any one operating system, organisation or web browser. There are a good set of international standards which determine how information is delivered to and presented by browsers. Most – no, make that, "nearly all" –  browsers are compliant with those standards, within a few degrees of buggishness and interpretation. So making a site work with these is a matter of tweaking by degree, not kind. There is of course one notable exception, and that (again, "of course") is Microsoft: it's browsers display a level of both disregard for standards and are of such a bug-ridden nature that making a site work consistently requires delving into an underworld of hacks, tweaks and rewrites that are sufficient to cause apoplexy or death-by-boredom in any thinking organism.

In order to tread the fine line of compromise between high-handed disregard for poor design and monopolistic practice and preventing the many users of such products from actually accessing these sites, I've gone for the "greatest good of the greatest number" and made everything work fine with most open source browsers and the latest version of Internet Explorer, on Windows and Mac. Those that don't work properly at the moment are Opera and Omniweb. This will be attended to just as soon as possible.

Please do consider this, by preference, an ABM site: Anything But Microsoft. If they ever learn and decide to create standards-compliant browsers, then that's just find and dandy. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the world's web designers bring a class action against Microsoft, to claim for the time, lives and money lost in trying to make their bloody browsers work. Me, I'm off to ride my motorcycle.

This site has been developed using CSS and XHTML and most of the code will happily validate against these standards, exceptions being CSS hacks to work around MIE bugs/features and some of Movable Type's own code. Tsk.

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