My current main ride is a 1998 Ducati 916. Here is an image of me coming out of the so-called "rattle-snake" chicane at the Motorsport Ranch track which is located near Cresson Texas. The bike is slightly modified, with an Arrow intermediate Ti exhaust system (45mm to 50mm), a Nichols flywheel and clutch basket, a 14 tooth front sprocket, Fren Tubo kevlar clutch and brake lines. I also have a few decorative touches on the bike such as STM frame plugs, a Motowheels license relocation kit and an AFAM quick change rear sprocket.
I have recently weighed this bike, on an accurate scale, it weighs 450.8 LB (with a full tank of gas). With all my riding duds on, the bike and I weigh about 600LB. That is less than all Harley big twin based bikes weigh less rider. The bike has more rear wheel HP than most Harleys as well. For you Harley folks that don't believe me, here is a dyno chart (including the CO levels) done on a non-inertial Factory Pro dyno at AF1 Racing.
As you may know, an inertial dyno measures how fast a bike can spin up an inertial mass located in the dyno whereas a non-inertial dyno measures torque at a constant RPM (i.e., real power). Obviously a bike with large diameter rear wheel, heavy engine rotating or reciprocating components etc. will accelerate the dyno inertial mass more slowly. Big bikes will always look worse on an inertial dyno than lightweight bikes. So if this bike had been measured on an inertial dyno the results would have been between 10% to 15% higher since the very light reciprocating inertia inherent to a Ducati twin and aided by the light flywheel, clutch etc. would have increased the measured power.
While it's debatable as to which measurement is best (neither really), the non-inertial case removes the advantage of lesser rotational inertia and makes the comparison between lightweight twins and "big twins" on an equal basis. Their aren't many big twins that make comparable tractable power at the rear wheel and those that do weigh (with rider) at least 100 pounds more. Big twin bikes have a great deal of rotational inertia in the rotating elements and those elements have to be spun up when the bike accelerates which gobbles up real power. of course all that weight and rotational inertia makes all big bikes (including Honda Goldwings, BMW KT1200LT etc.) harder/slower to accelerate, stop, turn and maneuver. Heavy bikes seem like a hopelessly bad idea in every way imaginable. But if big bikes turn you on...
Anyway, as to the chart, the blue line is a run with an Arrow chip and the red line is a run with the stock chip. The Arrow chip was too fat at the bottom end, about 8% CO. Since the stock chip is about 3% CO and the throttle response is is crisp so as of this writing, I'm running it with the stock chip (until I can get the CO adjusted). The dyno chart is conservative though, I recently timed the cams and found that the vertical cylinder was off by about 4 degrees. I've learned a lot about timing desmo cams and will soon publish a guide. I can say this though, you can do things with desmo that you can't do with valve spring motors. Desmo rules.
I haven't yet taken the bike back to the dyno but based on the track performance, I am pretty sure that I picked up 5 HP over the above dyno chart. That puts the power to weight ratio of me and the bike is 6 to 1. That's a lot. Remember that unlike a car, the weight of the rider matters on a bike.
While I like the bike, I must admit that it has had several failures but fortunately most occurred under the warranty. I doubt that most people would put up with the grief that my Ducati has given me. For what Ducati charge for bikes, they should be able to do better. But before I enumerate some of these problems, I have to admit that the current Austin Ducati dealership is a really first class operation. They have alway been honest and they do excellent work. The head of the shop, Marcello is very competent, I would trust him with my bike completely.
As to the problems that I have had, these include: many radiator coolant overflow tank failures, the brake light lever switch was replaced, a fuel line burst (internal to the tank fortunately), the transmission output counter shaft came from the factory bent, the charging system had to be completely replaced and a total of five rocker arms failed.
If you look closely at the most recent rocker arm failure , you can see that not only has the chrome control surface shattered, the cam lobe itself has suffered some damage. Each rocker arm costs $200! There are other documented cases of this kind of failure, for example here, here and here. Ducati claims that this is an issue of maintenance but my bike was maintained by Kasson's Ducati (who was the local Ducati dealer). I got rebuilt rockers Nichols Manufacturing. The rockers actually are repaired by Megacycle Cams but Nichols usually has rockers in stock so that you can get them in a hurry if you need them. Nichols also has a bunch of nifty parts for Ducati's. They are good folks.
Even if when they don't blatantly fail, Ducati bikes still require significant maintenance compared to other motorcycles. For example, the valve lash must be checked once every 10000Km (or about 6300 miles). The maintenance for Ducati bikes is not inexpensive either, the 20000KM (12,600 mile) service cost me $900.00. So if you own a Ducati and don't do the frequently required maintenance yourself, you might end up in the poor house.
However expensive Ducati bikes may be to purchase and maintain, they are a hoot to ride; they handle superbly and are plenty fast. Ducati bikes are also surprisingly fuel efficient considering the performance, in over 32,000 miles, I have averaged about 43 MPG on mine. This includes many track days. I have several times ridden 175 miles before the fuel light came on, since the tank is 17 liters and the reserve is at 4 liters, this means I could have gone about 225 miles on those occasions. I admit that on those days I was riding at a fairly constant speed (not on super slab but on twisty roads with almost no stopping).
So the net is that no matter how much trouble my 916 may give, it is NOT for sale.
Though to tell the truth, anything with two wheels that weighs less than 500 pounds is better than anything with four wheels, so if you are thinking about a Ducati but are concerned about cost then by all means consider an Yamaha R6 or R1 which offer most of the performance (if not the striking visual appearance) for considerably less money. If you just have to have an Italian bike but don't want a Ducati, you would do well to look at an Aprilia.
If you don't ride but ever thought you might like to ride a motorcycle, take the Motorcycle Safety Course first. You should take this class even if you rode in the past. I learned to ride when I 13 years old but as old dog, I ride much better now after having taken classes. Swallow your pride, take all the riding class you can, it will be worth it.
Also, always wear a helmet unless you think your brain does not merit protection. It doesn't take much of a spill to get a significant concussion, you are not as good as good a rider as you think you are. I can't speak for anyone else, but I certainly don't want to have to relearn the alphabet nor any of my mathematics. For this reason I have been wearing a helmet since I started riding. because I think my brain is valuable and worth protecting.
The basic idea is to use the initrd (initial ram disk method) that cause linux to create a ram disk for the initial root file system. The action of initrd is to execute a shell script named /linuxrc from the root file system. This script will mount /proc and write to the file /proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev the major/minor number of the real root device (the major number for md is 9 and the minor number in my case is 0 for /dev/md0). When linuxrc has done the required tasks (in my case, start the raid), one usually will unmount /proc and exit from the /linuxrc script at which point the kernel switches to the real root file system and boots in a fairly normal manner.
My raid consists of a set of nine 2.2GB IBM UltarStar/ES UltraWide Drives with three ASUS PCI-SC875 ultra wide scsi controllers (each controller running 3 disks). I am getting about 40MB/s read/write speeds. The system itself is a dual pentium pro over-clocked to 80Mhz system bus and 240Mhz CPU clock speed. The boot volume for my system is a tiny little 160MB scsi disk that is used mainly to hold the kernel and the initial ram disk file system.
And while it has nothing to do with motorcycles and computers, I also like to fiddle around with math especially geometry.
I would rather be riding my Ducati even though it breaks so often
