Rockers
 

This was sent to me in an email. I don't know the sender and take no responsibility for any content:-

Dear Ducati owners.
I have three Ducatis at the moment and do all of my own service and repair work.I'm not afraid of Desmo heads and I'm sure many of you feel the same. My 996 suffered cam follower peeling at 13,000 miles and I was not prepared to spend £1600 on new parts of dubious quality. I talked to a local specialist engineering firm and they agreed with my opinion that the hard chrome on the original parts is a cost cutting measure and not suitable in situations of constant impact unless of absolute top quality. (Try tapping a painted metal surface for a long time a see what happens to the paint.) The hard chrome does not have the toughness of the normal decorative copper/nickle/chrome and is only as good as the base metal. I therefore had tooling made so that 0.5mm of thickness could be spark erroded from the old parts whils5t maintaining the profile. Then high quality stellite was laser welded onto the parts to build them back up at a relatively low temperature. Finally the stellite was
cut back to the original profile again by spark errosion. The stellite is fused to the base metal rather than brased, and is exceptionally hard and tough. The bike is back together and runs a treat and for around a third of the cost. A much better fix all round. I gave the tooling to the company that did the sparking and welding job for me and would suggest that your members might want to contact them. I've got about 1000 miles on the parts so far with no problems at all. Contact Amery Engineering, Mill Lane, Alton Hampshire. 01420 80298. They are a very good crowd to deal with.

Any one any comments on this?

There's a few companies out there that can "fix" the rocker problem. It's not a cheap fix though.

Usually about fifty quid a rocker to have them treated, never mind the cost to get the thing in bits.

It does seem to be a lottery as to whether your bike suffers from the problem, that makes you wonder how often the susceptible bikes get checked for this problem, some do routinely, others.............

Ray.

I'm frightened to get mine checked.

Sounds good but those guys should also investigate to better forms of coatting like the diamond/black coat. That how they do the RS rockers.
This should provide harder coating and less friction too.
I would be interested looking into this.

I read a magazine called MotoTechniques. They have plenty of hard coatting companies supplying F1 teams and all in that mag.

p

Yes, stellite's certainly a good idea but he's comparing the cost against replacement of all the rockers with new ones at Ducatis ridiculous new prices. Several companies offer high quality chrome plating which seems to work ok and stays on, unlike the factory shite.