Ducati Desmosedici

As a 999r owner I received preferential treatment as line placement goes. I was able to secure a place in line without putting a deposit down with a dealer (Section 8 Superbike) and also received the lower tier pricing of $67K =/-

Being in the construction materials business in 2008 there was no way I would be able to afford a Desmo. I tried to sell my place in line, posted an ad on every Ducati forum and received very little interest.
Finally out of the blue I received a phone call from a guy that was interested. I told him, send me $5,000 and I receive it I'll call Ducati North America and transfer my right to purchase.

The next day a FedEx arrived with a cashiers check for $5,000 and the rest is history.

 

I've been following this series from day 1. It started out as sprucing up a bike that was sat for while. It turned into a bit more than that. Latest update posted today. It's been a great insight into these bikes! It has been a looooooong process. Funny when they compare the headgasket to an RSV-4. Very funny.

 

$700 head gasket?

 

Low volume production bike, yep that makes sense.
And how much is a head gasket for Bugatti Veyron?

 

There's a Desmo on Ebay now that can probably be bought for 35K. One of the cheapest I've seen so far...

 

Does anyone have a copy of the video (animated) with the douche duc guy talking to two coworkers about how badass his Ducati is?

it might be 10-14 yrs old but funny AF

 

Try having a one off set made that requires them to make new dies. $700 will look decidedly cheap.

 

Waterjet should be precise enough nowadays, right?

 

Still need the press dies for a multilayer steel gasket. If you were doing a copper gasket that'd be plenty good enough.

The Harmony 400 is sitting in the garage at this very moment with a $4500 dollar set of head gaskets in it.

 

Desmo tax

 

That's very real. Ask the Bentley owner that pays massive prices for their Volkswagen parts.

 

peanuts.

 

Same as a Porsche, Nissan GTR, BMW M, etc etc.

 

The parts I’ve gotten on the cheap for the cayenne by looking up the Tuareg equivalent...

Or using Toyota type4 Trans Fluid for $6 the bottle (11quarts needed) vs the PORSCHE—>$ 7 5 <— per bottle (same bottle shape as the Toyota, just different sticker, chemically 99.9% identical
Yup seventy five bucks per quart

 

Yep and they have a massive group of brainwashed people that worry so much about the resale value of the vehicle being impacted that they will only pay for overpriced labor in the service bay and only use Porsche approved chemicals in the vehicles. If you think the "What kind of oil.." threads here are funny they don't have shit on the "Porsche approved coolant" threads on the Rennlist forums. It is absolutely comical.

 

This thread delivers !

I had a story with a 999r owner during a track day at Calabogie. Back in my more "serious" (for a VRRA guy) racing days, I was an ok rider and could whip my FZR 400 at a decent pace that would embarass many modern displacement bikes.

I had spent the day dicing on track with a guy riding a 999r (about 3x the power of my FZR). I would pass him in about every corner and he would destroy me on the straights. It was actually pretty fun. At the end of the afternoon, I dove under him in turn 1, a fast, blind left hand dog leg and gain a bike lenght on him. For some reason, he didn't see me and got back on the gas so we were neck and neck braking for turn 2. There's a wall on the outside of T2 and he started squeezing me towards it so I had to give him the elbow to let him know I was there. Anyways, we both went straight the gravel and were laughing discussing it afterwards. He was an overall cool guy. But my little fizzer was handing him his ass

 

I have to ask, what is a "Harmony 400" and why do those gaskets cost so damn much?

 

thanks for that!!

 

The Harmony 400 is the bike you see in my avatar. It's a not so lightly modified 89 VFR400. It has a really expensive set of head gaskets to make the really expensive custom JE pistons and block bridging work. No one made a gasket to deal with the size pistons I put in it.

 

Sweet jesus!!