Monster Mod #2: Bitubo Steering Damper

Bitubo Steering Dampner

It’s early in the morning and the dog is barking… Loudly… Peering through the door’s eye piece I catch a glimpse of a box and smile. Cracking the door open, I desperately try to hold the mutt back, but it’s tough. He’s excited and so am I… Standing in the doorway is a cacophony of brown. “Got another delivery for ya,” the local UPS guy says with all to knowing smirk. I get the feeling he too is in love with the Monster… Because as each box shows up, he gets to take five and talk bikes… And really is there anything better?

And so it begins…

The second mod to the Monster — well, actually it’s the first uninstalled mod to be fair — was a simple one.

If you’ve read my review of the Ducati S2R 1000 Monster for Pro Italia, you’ll know that while I totally dug the bike and what it represented, and thus obviously ended up picking one up for myself, I was not so keen on the less than solid windscreen.

Removing it was both an aesthetical choice as well as a practical one. While riding the bike, the cafe-styled half-fairing just didn’t feel very structurally sound. Above 70 mph it felt like it was a disaster waiting to happen - at least in my book. But more importantly, in my mind there’s something extraordinarily classic about the unfaired Monster lines that Miguel Galluzzi penned in ‘93. The virtue of the bike in many ways is its simplicity and the half-fairing somehow broke that for me. So with that in mind, the windscreen is now gone. Out of here. Adios. Two bolts and see ya later… I believe its destiny is to become a beautiful exercise in eBay commerce…

Yet even though that was the ‘first’ change that took place on the bike, it wasn’t really the first ‘mod’…

That honor falls to a brand new Bitubo Steering Damper. Since picking up the ‘08 S2R, I’ve had a chance to take it on two relatively short rides (>100 miles) — neither one posted to the blog since I had yet to have the time to write anything meaningfully intelligent about actually taking delivery of the bike in the first place — and on both occasions the front end felt quite different then I remembered it feeling during the week I had a similar machine for the Pro Italia review. I’d go into corners and where I expected security and that famed Ducati superbike ethos, I’d find undulation and fear. Where I’d wick it up a bit, the bike would hesitate with marked indifference before shaking it’s head slightly and barking. Much like the dog. The front never quite feeling as confident as some of the other rides in the garage. Each time I’d ask myself, the eternal riding question, “Is it me or is it the bike?”… I’m still not 100% sure, but thanks to the last trackday my confidence is much higher than it was and my gut kept telling me it wasn’t my riding but rather something missing on the machine.

Since every other ride in the garage, with the exception of the ST3, has a steering damper (and frankly I’ve always thought that was the one glaring omission on that bike from the factory), I thought adding one to the Monster would be an obvious place to start. If afterward the bike still echos uncertainty, then I’ll go to step two and look into a proper suspension set up at a place such as Race Tech (A company who has set-up both Milt’s F4 and my 999 at the track and it was without a doubt some of the best money we’ve spent — I honestly can’t say enough good things about those folks).

So once I decided it was time to investigate adding a steering damper to the bike, the next logical question was which one?

As with all things Monster, the choices are seemingly endless. My initial thought was to look into adding an Ohlins unit, since that’s an obvious suspension choice for a Ducati and something I’m at least a bit versed in thanks to the 1098S, but everywhere I turned the Ohlins solution resulted in a steering damper that ended up needing to be mounted to one side of the side of the frame and a rather unappealing fork clamp (at least to me), so relatively quickly that idea ran its course and I started searching for alternative options.

That search eventually lead to two distinct possibilities — An Arrow kit and a Bitubo Kit — Originally I was leaning towards the Arrow system since the last time I was at the MV Agusta Factory in Varese, Italy, they had piles of Arrow boxes sitting around and if Arrow is good enough for MV, it’s certainly good enough for me … but then of course fate intervened.

While surfing the new Ducati Monster Forum, I stumbled on to a thread called Black Gold Struck in SoCal, without really thinking about it I clicked the link and suddenly my head began spinning… Another local SoCal rider had done a number on his Monster and the result was absolutely spectacular… A look that I never would have thought would be my thing, suddenly seemed like the only route to go…

Suddenly everything began to crystallize - the BoomTube exhausts, the purpose of the bike, the colors, the vision and suddenly an either/or steering damper choice got remarkably simple. Even though both systems looked equally great, the The Bitubo system was the only one that came in Gold.

Of course, like many things in my life, I spent way to much time pondering the addition before moving to action. Call it financial hesitancy — even when the outcome is never really in doubt… With the next great road-trip adventure just around the corner (quite literally, posts to come), I realized that I was now battling both the clock and the inventory window of the usual suspect shops. So with that in mind, I decided to reach outside the norm.

Having read great things about a Ducati parts supplier called Desmoworks in Indiana (the former LoudBike parts shop), I gave them a shout since they listed the Bitubo unit in question on their website. (If you’ve got some time to burn, check out their blog… it’s beautiful eye-candy… just put your wallet away before hand )… Practically minutes later the chap who runs it, Anthony Creek, gave me a ring back and I laid out exactly what was going on, what I was interested in and what the time constraints were. Anthony didn’t blink. Actually he was pretty awesome about it all, and even though he didn’t have the unit in gold in stock, he got right on the horn and a few minutes later was able to unequivocally tell me that he would be able to drop ship the unit directly from his distributor and guaranteed that it’d be in LA by the next afternoon, which would give me plenty of time to install it before the coming adventure. So really, how can you say no to customer service like that? And sure enough less than 24 hours later my favorite UPS guy was standing at my door with another box in hand.

What was inside is just magical…

The Bitubo unit is brilliantly machined, it looks awesome, but of course the directions for installation are, well, typically Italian. There’s lot of words and numbers, but um.. well some interesting translation. Of course having never installed a steering damper myself before, part of me was certainly more than a bit nervous. Not so much about the bolting on as the idea that I was about to unscrew and re-screw two of the bolts that directly attach the handlebars to the triple clamps and somewhere in the back of my mind the image of riding down the road as the bars came off in my hands flashed before my eyes. But, one of the great things about installing something yourself is that as you do it images like that are lessened by the fact that you begin to gain an understanding of what you’re fixing/adding/altering and in the case of the damper it didn’t take long to realize that this was really no big deal. If you can screw in a lightbulb, you can put one of these suckers on your bike. It’s really that simple.

The biggest issue I encountered during the entire install was that the unit shipped with the riser attached to the wrong side of the bracket that comes off the handlebars, so the first time I put it on the bike the steering damper and the bracket didn’t line up correctly. But after a quick smoke break, I took a step back, double checked that everything in the package had S2R written somewhere on it and gave it a quick think. There didn’t seem to be anything to lose by trying to flip-flop the riser and once I did everything worked perfectly. All in all it was like a hour of total wrenching time, including the upside down riser fiasco. For the first mod, I’d say that’s not to shabby

And I could be happier, it’s a sweet looking unit and thus far seems to work rather well. Of course the proof will be in the pudding, as they say, and that’s about to come…