Workshop war stories revealed
Ducati expert Kevin Hollingsworth gets to grips with a wonky headstock
‘It’s a shame for a bike that’s a modern classic’
This chap came into the workshop the other day on his 2000 Ducati 748 Biposto which he’s recently acquired, complaining that he couldn’t get the steering lock to engage and he wasn’t sure about the steering either.
Those bikes have an eccentric hub in the headstock that allows you to alter the geometry by rotating the hub to go from a ‘road’ setting to ‘race’ setting. The procedure is to loosen the steering head clamp bolts, unscrew a locking pin, then loosen and remove the top yoke which allows you access to a castellated nut that you rotate through 180 degrees using the correct-sized C-spanner. If you are going for the ‘road’ setting, when you look down at it as you are sitting on the bike the thicker part of the eccentric is towards the nose of the machine and the thinner part towards the tank. If you then ran a line through the steering head the forks would be relatively kicked out. Rotate the eccentric by 180 degrees, and the ‘race’ setting pushes the top fork yoke forwards and pulls the bottom fork yoke backwards.
When I saw how the castellated nut had been butchered I fully expected the steering to be offcentre as I’ve heard about one where the steering stem was at eight o’clock, not 12 or six, and the bloke wondered why it was pulling to one side. Anyway, when we removed the nut we could see what had happened. A previous owner had adjusted the hub to the race setting (which makes the steering lock unusable) and yet another owner had tried to adjust it back. He probably loosened off the clamp bolts, but the locking pin was beyond him, so that had stayed in situ and he’d been mullering the castellated nut with a hammer and chisel by the look of it, as it was a terrible mess.
Luckily there was no damage to the frame and there were enough ‘castles’ on the nut that we were able to clean up, so it’s still perfectly functional and safe on the road setting with a steering lock. But for a bike that’s an appreciating classic, it’s a shame. If you wanted it 100% mint again, a new hub comes in at £395 plus fitting. All the previous owner had to do was take the time to have a good look around the area, and they would have seen the pin.