26/07/2026
Had a new one last week. Needed to pull the alternator cover off a 916 to do the starter clutch. Easy enough you'd expect? Not so. I've had a few 916 alt covers off over the years. Never had one blocked by the frame before. It's not a lot of blocking, but it's not like you can give it a push to get it past.
This is a 1998 model year bike. VIN in the low 14,000, so late, but not the last of them. The piece of frame in question is the leading edge of the vertical pipe, continued up and bent forward a little past the engine mount boss. Just enough. I thought it was just a big weld at first, but then realised it was actually the frame tube itself.
I had an earlier bike in as well - VIN 9,000 ish - and it was just a straight tube up and welded, like I would have expected. It would have let the cover slide straight off.
The fix is to drop the engine. To drop the engine, you just loosen the front engine mount bolt, remove the rear engine mount bolt, swingarm pivot pin, exhaust collector screws and the muffler mounting screws and down it drops. Just.
When Ducati made these things, one thing they didn't do was grease anything that didn't really need to be greased right now, but could benefit from said grease at some point in the future. Even things that required grease now, like steering head bearings, didn't get much of a coating. The engine mount bolts go into holes that have what you might call a "relaxed fit". But not the swingarm pivot pin. It's a 20mm OD hollow pin, sized accurately on the outside and plated to wave a pointless finger in the face of the impending corrosion. It goes through a 20mm hole in the frame, a few 20mm ID bushes, a 20mm hole in the engine cases, another (much longer) 20mm ID sleeve and another 20mm hole in the frame. All size for size. The long bush inside the LH swingarm pivot needle roller bearings in particular seems to be the enemy of note.
Sometimes you can put a suitably sized fitting in the RH end of the pin (to protect the thread you definitely don't want to damage) and wail on it with a hammer. But the successfulness of that approach, especially on a pin that hasn't seen daylight since the factory, is generally inversely proportional to the years since fitment. These days, you quilt it a few times, realise it's not going anywhere without real coercion, then reach for the pulling jig.
Of course, if you have the time you can heat and spray penetrant, wait, repeat, and all that s**t to make yourself feel better, but when you need to get it done, you get it done.
I machined a nice nylon bush a few years ago that sits against the frame boss on the LH side, with a thin lip on the frame side just enough to locate it the frame boss, and another on the other side to locate a piece of tube used to pull the pivot pin into. Simply to protect the frame paint, really. A piece of 12mm threaded rod goes through the hole in the pin, and is used to wind it out. I use a 12mm tube nut on the RH end (where the short, 15mm or so retaining bolt screws into), with the corners of the flats machined off to allow it to fit through the 20mm holes as it comes along.
Unfortunately, in this instance the pin had no intention of moving, with the nylon bush being squeezed and cut into on both sides. I had to swap it out for a piece of aluminium to get the big bang of initial movement. As expected, it damaged the frame paint - it's unavoidable when you're putting that much pressure through a narrow painted face. After that, the pin rather reluctantly conceded and slowly wound out.
I didn't take a photo of the pin, but the rear engine mount bolt gives you the idea.
At that point, the engine should have dropped even a little on its own, but I still had to lever it down to get it about 6mm lower at the rear - you can see the half moon of case through the rear engine mount hole. Just enough to get the cover off, do the job and back on.
And then I refitted the pin and rear engine bolt with a grease coating - I also give the holes in the engine and swingarm pivot a liberal spray through with the Wurth HHS2000, just to make sure of it. Before I tightened it all up, I thought I'd knock the front engine mount bolt out for a clean and grease too. At which point it appeared there was someone on the assembly line with a sense of humour - it was covered in the grey grease. Slid straight out. Bastard.
Hopefully, I won't see another frame like this one for a while. But if I remember, I'll check others I have in out of simple curiosity
