Going up teeth on the rear will bring down your top speed, but improve the acceleration of the bike, because you're "squeezing" the output of the bike into a shorter range.

This has the side effect that you will alter the revs you are doing at certain speeds. For example, on my 748 it wouldn't sit happily at 40mph because it was too high for 1st (screaming) and too low for 2nd, in that it kept spitting and missing and generally running poor.

This made town traffic a nightmare. Changing the gearing move the range of the gears so that 1st is shorter, but in 2nd it now runs lovely at 40mph because it's slightly higher up the rev range and runs much better.

If you go the other way of removing teeth from the rear, you're making the gears "longer" and increasing the top speed, but obviously it will reduce the acceleration.

This topic has been discussed many times before and it's generally accepted that dropping to a 14t front from an original 15t (equivalent to going up 2 or 3 teeth at the rear) is the best and cheapest (a new front sprocket is about £15 from Ducati) modification you can make to most of the Ducati range.

Welcome aboard Mark!

The short answer is that you get faster acceleration at the expense of lower top speed. Since you rarely get to go 130mph on the roads you won't miss the latter, but you'll certainly appreciate the former!

Long answers are forthcoming from the experts.

cheers, Chi

beat me to it Antony. See you at Jamies!

:lol:

so what would be good for a 748 - the front is a 14 already i think and the rear 38 or 39 from memory - so would a 14/42 combo be good?

I run 14 / 40, which is pretty good. It's 14 / 38 as standard and a 39 isn't going to do much.

The only problem is that 14 / 40 needs a longer chain to get the eccentric hub in the right position.

Wow
So much tecky knowledge, and from such a small girlie...................

Go Lisa go..................Phwoooaaaarrrrrr indeed

see you all REALLY soon

24 hours to goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Mort missing Blooo

or was it Blooo missing Mort ???????????

OK I am convinced that i NEED this mod too!!!!!

What sizes would be recommended for the 1000SS?
What part numbers? Where to buy them from? and how much?

PLUS what about the chain, longer/shorter etc...

Would like to keep the original chain if possible.

:D:D:D:D

For the 1000SS I recommend changing from 15/38 96-links to 15/42 98-links. You'll be geared slightly higher, but can keep your chain (and save quite a bit of money) if you just change the front sprocket to 14/38.