V-Moto's Ducati 996 Engined ST2 Custom Cafe Racer

Hello, my name is v Cowley. I run a company called V

moto

. I'm never a Lorimer. This is my special jayati built by VF Cowley V

moto

, so this bike came from my passion for doing the BAD a big mile in 2017. I bought a bike that I thought needed a bit of tuning to make it race rally ready, It turned out to be quite a different project and I met with Cowley. We were introduced at Casselton Bike Night, which is a big bike festival in Oxfordshire. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend and was told that Viv would be the man who could help me.

Little did I know or know at the time how much work would be put in to bring what I thought was an already finished bike to what we see before us now, yes, that shipment to a monster, isn't it? It's not literally a monster, but quite a project, so now I thought of this bike as I bought it largely as an unfinished project, stillborn, to say the least, and it was only then that I had a real idea of ​​what what had to be done to meet the tight deadline of about three or four weeks, yes, so that depended on when they would take the bike for the big Mile, so it was really a matter of evaluating what we had and we divided it into its basics so for me I had to start with the frame as there was some really nasty manufacturing on the back so ok come on let's get to the basics. and that's what we did now he came he helped me we had it all spread out all over my shop floor yeah I remember him scrubbing the engine with a brush and brake cleaner trying to make the engine look nice he did we painted everything, so it came. well, no, yes, very short gap, yes, yes, I think that was a big learning point for me, my bike was modified until it was just bolting on, taking off, picking something out of a catalog and unscrewing something, bolting something back on.

In the same place, I think my deadline of about three weeks to deliver the Vivir bike and have it finished, I think the enormity of the graph quickly dawned on me, yes, the bike was essentially stripped down to its component parts. I did the best I could with her. which brush to try and make things look pretty good there, well, we've done all the technical stuff to it to make it look like it does now. I mean, the saving grace was that it came with a call, well, you know, the swing. arm they had eight four eight forks I had the stem triple nine I had a different seat unit to the one you see now but the building blocks were there in place you had a radio here on a very well made new radiator and it was just a case of taking it apart and evaluate it and never sent him to take some photos, offer his websites and show me what he wanted and we really started with the project to get a real vision of what he was interpreting and what I would interpret. and what he wanted, yeah, so, yeah, we'll talk about some of the parts of the bike, I think, and I'll tell you what's changed since that original incarnation of what it was when I first picked it up, yeah, when he came to me like I said, he had some good bass parts, we had the eight, four, eight, the forks, actually, we took them apart, stripped it down, I managed to convince him not to have it black, he wanted them, golden Larry , but I was slowly but surely persuaded.

For him, we were building a bike, not a gypsy caravan, so we went with black. We got the really nice NCI buds there, they are beautiful as far as buds go, the firm urns are black nitride, we stored the rotors there and the spk on it went bad. items we got from a Silverstone place whenever yes my friend works with Aaron so he has top of the line patented brakes with the monoblock calipers that you actually got in the US. Yes, I bought the m4 clamps when I was away, we worked. in the United States, so I picked up a set of those if it had the original eight four eights, but as soon as we got it all the way through, yeah, the mother blocks with those rotors were fine originally, this bike didn't have these.

The wheels on when he came to me had triple nine, the front wheel is magnesium, just a standard for Kathy, five spoke, really, yes, yes, and again, good powers of persuasion. I managed to convince him that this bike needed spoked wheels and there was really only one place. to go for that and that's Kineo, the lead tile on the wheels was eight weeks, yeah, so I didn't actually have the wheels on for the WRONG, a big mile, no, that's right, I see that the wheels, The brakes came after the mile. mile below the Chewbacca dock, sure we'll do it, we'll get it sorted, we did a refurbishment, no, yeah, so yeah, that's the undercarriage on the front, pretty neat, we used radial calipers, you had to use those kind of top of the line patented stuff, so we Let's go to the headlight and the whole graduated engine display unit, so now you've brought back a property, I would say economy or eBay special, eBay special, yeah, and then I made this cover here to house the display unit, which was more or less nice when it was all power to cover it, okay, you know, it almost looks like it was born that way, which is always nice when going down the lighthouse mountain, the support Mounting itself is a loop I made with some hub bushings and made it to the front of the yoke.

It broke my heart to have to drill holes in the NCI yoke, but it was a matter of having to do it since it also supports the T-piece for the front brake lines, so so I did it. I don't want any switches on it. I wanted it to look nice and clean, so we got these Motown buttons still to work with the engine devices, so we have the engine gauges, pretty much all the electrical components on one desk. Blue em unit running electrical system, we opted for keyless ignition with EM lock yes so all the electrical systems we wanted worked and looked great.

I didn't want it to have a lot of cables, well, there were a lot of cables. it was a rat's nest, a rat's nest of wires and in all the warrior I think it's fair to mention Richard Prowse with motorcycle guarantees, but yes, he has done a top-of-the-line job, albeit with a pretty big dent in his pocket de Nevels, there you have it. and something that again, just a little thing from me, is good in building a summit like this. I would hate to see ties around the frame tube so that all the cables have their little ones, there are some little separate mounts that I did a great job on the back of the tubes so that all the wiring and wiring Richard was divided into two parts.

You have in effect two looms, you have the main loom that does all the engine control in the ECU. which is located on the seat unit and then you have the nuts and bolts of the bike, i.e. the lights, the indicators, the horn, all those parts were separated on two separate looms, another little hiccup when we were looking for where to put the battery because although we opted for that different seat unit than the one the bike ever brought me, there was no space where it was going to be, there was not going to be space in that seat unit for a battery since this works with an ECU Older style Ducati, which is a pretty big unit and there just wasn't room up there so we opted to put the battery in there and made a little aluminum tray and it's mounted there, there's a lot of airflow over it. people often get up so it must be too hot in there, well to be fair it seems like a good direct line of airflow and even if the bikes are going slow there is a fan that will kick in, okay you know, We haven't blogged about temperatures or anything, but I'm pretty sure everything is fine and it has never shown any problems reversing.

We have this triple nine tank and a really nice tank, but in conjunction with the dummy

racer

seat unit there was a major problem here. Not that you know they're getting that closed shape to match the triple nine tank because a triple nine tank has a large cutout area therefore the original seat has to go in so I did some steel work in there and I soldered and then the painter lost the rest, so with reference to the painting this was done by my powers. I put Norman Dales in Daventry. There are no decals on this tank for the unit.

They are all hand cut templates. Thanks Neville for letting me put that in there. the white stripe just tanks after the days of not being able to race a cool smart bike and that kind of thing where you used to be able to see the fuel level through a fiberglass tank while we were here . I forgot to mention the yokes triple trees top shelf stuff from NCR donated but they came from bradley smith from his start in the parts bin so thanks bradley and here we go with another quality again, the seat unit dictated the shape of the subframe, so the frame was cut here originally and Adds some horrendous fabrication here, I think it's been troubled with a shovel or something, but yeah, the subframe goes up and supports all the ECU and the other electrical relay blocks and things that were located back there and it is also duplicated. for the rear support bracket for the tank that keeps its rubber support like it would on a triple nine, these are another special type of inspection of the Achilles rear sets, they are actually in four, nine, one, six, I bought them for viv again, that's how it was. something I thought we could just screw on will be: can we buy?

Yes, these are the reboots I found. Can we put them there? And actually, I don't think point two was designed to have a state sponsor. and again the original st two frame would have ended at that engine attachment point there, there would have been none of this in the past. I've built some monster single side swingarm bikes from the mid 90's from the previous generations and I look at them every time you ride one. side swingarm in a setup like this, since you can't run it, you need to be sure you need a trigger mount for the arm because, under a single sided arm, the bending load continues on the swingarm pivot and without the support. you would end up being addicted in cases where it would break the current crankcases, so this tube not only bends to give the swing arm the support it needs, but of course it gives it enough for the footrest and there is a nice little bar.

Set up in their world, it was a pretty good weird take. I always thought it was going to be close to the escape, but that's a lot less adventurous. The BC we have to space them out. At first we had the back games. on and then once the exhaust was made we needed room in those gaps, now you need to take that big pour which is my favorite part of the bike so I'll explain it succinctly rather than remind you, these are the days from LeMond, this better pipe here. it's actually an exhaust section from a Jaguar and bitter LeMond car on my bike with boss lambda. that means that, you know, they would have taken the readings from the LeMond car in a, fortunately, we've had it hanging around in a drawer, annette, of all the tricks and tricks and electronic gadgets and it's a this is a this is this is my favor I have my own little piece of LeMond history on my bike, so that set is a little bit of me.

We're on the subject of the exhaust, so when it arrived it had a really nasty one, so there's a lot of them down here, so now it's leaving and coming back with a rotating graphic of the then newly launched Superleggera, yes, Ducati, which had a very similar. I say the same thing, it's still a lot more complex than the one I made and they hate Enzo, he said what are we going to do with Silas, so now I have all that in hand, I'll get the silencers, so he came one day and shot him. these. I said, well, that's a silencer, yeah, that's why one. so that's what you have so they're often motor to race bike obviously there was a longer section of pipe here a friend of ours raced moto 2 and he's able to get a couple of these and obviously in bike 2 only had Single sided they didn't have a dual exhaust system so again we have something that, you know, can you just bolt them on and end up with the lugs grinding, polished and reshaped to make it look like they were oversized ?

You just know it was ever made on a bolt on the right side of a mercenary, but not on the left side, so yes, the Ned swing arm, yes, the swing arm for RS, that was one of the parts that already it was on the Honda motorcycle when when we first received it, yes it was cleaned, it was polished, whether Viv's blaster got it all nice and clean, it was in a much worse state than now, the sprocket, which is the second again. iteration when we had the stock wheel before renting one, I bought a rental sprocket mount and then when we went with the Kineo wheels I wanted to keep that red and black anodized theme soyes, I bought the sprocket, the bracket was not anodized. everything, everything from AM, which I think is not too direct, it's quite subtle and you know, it finishes off the rear of the bike very well with the wheels, yeah, it's a nice continuation from the center to the edge, you know, the red and black.

As you say yes, and then I had to put some gold in with the fabric of the store, it wouldn't let me have it, it wouldn't let me have a gold fork, so I had to go for a gold, gold suspension, in any of the Two, for me, Olan was that was the place to go with another of his contacts. Well Andy Dawson works for Olinda and helped us with that so we had this shop built spring set up for my weight, before it was a little soft for me so I got rid of the stock and showed off a unit and put the OL engine, yes, and for me, the bike handles fantastically again, going back to the exhaust.

I use standard maintenance language on the first two tubes merged into the head and then literally from its back it's me and it's just a case of always being aware of the lengths of the primary lengths before moving on to the collective for the secondary there, they are pretty close, certainly within ten percent, it's an important consideration that I see a lot of other stings don't consider and yeah, the best of you can connect this too, dude, I think it's connected, yeah, that's good, it just sounds well yes, moving forward again but degraded sir, a little story about the engine, yes, so it is not the original engine. the one we built it with was built with a nine one six engine its neighbor and a nine nine six engine of the progress of a monster yes and that came from my incident in his bad one mile Amaya one of my darkest hours in a lay -In outside of Fort William we thought we hadn't had the bike on a map, it was running very poorly and we thought we were just pushing too much fuel through the engine and we were running too rich and that you know, we terminally damaged the engine when we got the bike back from EVIL a great mile and we sensibly took it to Viv's workshop.

We should have done a compression test to verify that it was the engine that was there. problem and we didn't do it, I ran out maybe in too much fog, it's an improvement, so we went from a nine one six engine to a nine nine six engine from an S 4 RS, but we put that engine. and the bike didn't run when we put the new engine in, so when we did what we should have done in the first place and checked the fuses and the relays, and it was actually the fuel pump relay that had failed on the original.

The engine we took out was absolutely fine so when it did and I broke down on a job in Fort William it had a fuel pump relay rather than anything mechanical so I've got a nine one six sitting there. the shelf ready for the next project in Viv's workshop, so yeah, let's see what happens with that, yeah, let's get into more details. The main problem on a water-cooled Ducati is the water pipes that you see, especially when you start shaking out clothes next to the ferry. and and I have the angel 8 to show for most people to go ahead and get a good set of Samko hoses.

This one you have a beautiful set of bright red in your face. Hose Sam, so again Neville gave me the thumbs up. to do what I felt was necessary so I made the water pipes out of aluminum so they're all made out of aluminum and then black powder coated and they have these couplings that in the aircraft industry are actually called a Wiggins clip in the one that Wiggins is written about and they are actually in the airplane world, they are known as a fluid transfer coupling so what you have is to cup Farrell here and under that sleeve there are two O-rings so that's what sealing it does also allows for some articulation so even though they appear to be solidly attached, they're actually rubber mounted and then the clip goes on and encapsulates the case that way and wherever you go we use them wherever we go. we can, just give it. that's real you know one detail and it ties into the racing world so it all connects no I said again what you get in black gets lost in the background yeah and then all the electrical systems I guess all electrical systems are. under under the seat we did it like this and I have had this over this seat removed more than once.

I've been in Scotland for the big mile so you just get up, you were at the back and then that's where it's all. everything housed and the definition that the ECU really is a beast, it's a monster and we're trying to package it up today along with Richard's skill wiring and then the power commander got on his back, we've got it all there so that tray it doubles as a Finishing the test on the rear light bracket and obviously a bracket for the ECU and the rear of the seat unit, so although it's a fair love to try to lose, we've done a pretty good job and lost it all.

Well, another thing we did to the engine was to machine some Lightning holes into the clutch cover to allow the dry clutch to vent properly again. It is something that is seen in the racing versions of this engine. I also think that's all the technical stuff. The details of the bike give you a little idea of ​​the trip I took and that it is not as simple as it seems. You'll take it outside and listen to it, that's when it will really make sense.