MotoCreations Newest Beast
Seems that Mark Savory from MotoCreations has been hard at work on a new custom Monster. As some of you might recall, Mark made some noise last year during the Ducati Monster Challenge with his chopped monster. (See previous posts, “American Chopper meets Italian Muscle” and “LBMC Show: Mark Savorys MotoCreations Ride” for more BG)
According to a post on the Speedzilla Forum, this new custom was inspired by the old vintage boardtrack racer section of the Barber Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I wanted to capture the “essence” of the boardtrack racer but with three design criteria — 1) it must be more “art deco” in design; 2) it must be easily identifed as a “custom bike”; and 3) it must utilize a Ducati engine (old single cylinder racing engine).”
According to the post, Mark’s annoucing the bike ahead of schedule because, “a journalist stuck his head in my shop when I wasn’t there and took pictures last week — my latest project in baremetal will be gracing a UK magazine without my authorization here soon. So I wanted to post pictures of MY PROJECT before he does…”
You can read the whole announcement, here and as always, mad props to Mark for thinking up yet another one-of-a-kind retro wonder… Pretty frigg’n cool IMHO.
Proof That Mankind Will Do Anything…
Every now and then you run across something on the web that just goes to prove that if something has an engine in it, mankind will find a way to screw with it… I don’t quite remember where I ran across this, but apparently someone has decided that after they bought a 999 that they really didn’t want all that plastic hanging around. Or maybe they just have had it with the sportbike look? So they’ve made their own monster… Pretty sure this voids the factory warrenty but what the hell do I know…
If someone posed the question ‘why?’ to whomever did this, the answer is bound to be because “I can”…Go figure.
A Real World Ducati Engine Rebuild
This one is for the folks out there who’ve always dreamed of pulling their Ducati engines and personally rebuilding them by hand. For the past month and a half an amazing thread has been going on over at the Ducati Monster.Org website. A fellow who goes by the handle de5m0mike decided to pull his Monster’s engine with around 4 thousand miles on it in order to clean it up and paint it. While he had it apart he ended up porting the engine a bit and generally tightening down the tolerances.
What makes this thread so engaging imho is that de5m0mike didn’t seem to know a whole heck of a lot before pulling his engine apart. Instead he learned as he went, at times leaning on a Haynes manual and the Ducati Monster forum for advice. After almost six weeks of trail and error, pain and sweet and sheer perseverance he prevailed. Running engine and all. You gotta give a fellow like that some serious mad props. I mean at some point haven’t we all thought to ourselves wouldn’t it be fun to rebuild my engine? This dude actually did it.
There’s also a thread over on Speedzilla about the project if you’re interested in a few other thoughts on the matter. Both threads are fantastic reads and well worth the time to check them out. I highly recommend them.
