Oh the woes of the ducati desmoquattro valve adjustment

So the 748 has been due for a valve adjustment for about the last 300 miles. I finally got down and well, frankly, spent the money to buy all the tools I would need to complete the job. Biggest purchase were the MBP collets and shim kit, but both are one time costs for sure that will set me up for later adjustments with no issues hopefully!

So here's the bike all torn down:


Had to take all the plastics off, fuel tank, seat, airbox, throttle bodies, and eventually will take the radiator off too to make things easier:



Belts had to come off with the adjustment pulley removed, new lock nuts ready to go:



Got new belts ready to go too, old and new here:


So I start on the vertical head because frankly, it's both the harder and easier head to work on depending on which side we're talking about, intake or exhaust.

I got my first look into the head of a desmoquattro:



And once you get the opening rockers off and the cam pulled, you can get really easy access to the valve shim stacks:



Access to take measurements isn't exactly easy depending on which head and which side, but I was able to at least get to them...

Here's the first reason why I decided to replace the half rings with MBP collets, those are supposed to be in TWO pieces, not three! And I found two valves with half rings in at least 3 pieces or more:



To get the closers off (and to get at those half rings, you push on the back of the closer rocker and things slide down pretty good:



Good shot of the shim stack with the opener shims removed:


Good shot of the OEM half rings and the MBP collets, check out the beefiness and the sheer better engineering:



Unfortunately, the VERY first problem I ended up with is that I lost one of the MBP collets down an oil passageway!!!!!!!! ARGGH. I'm almost certain now that it is in fact in the engine somewhere. I don't quite know what to do, but I will be flushing the engine with a couple of gallons of cheap dino oil to see if the collet will come out on its own. hopefully it does...

That was day 1, 9 hours of work, only 2 valves got adjusted.... ='(

Day 2, 9 hours of work again, but all closers were adjusted. BUT, I found the biggest kicker... All the opener rockers having flaking chrome!!!!! ARGH. The desmoquattro was well known for this issue as Ducati outsourced the coating process on the rockers. The outsourced company did not do the final heat treatment to relieve the stress in the chrome and after some hard wailing on the bike, the chrome starts to flake, your valves go WAY out of adjustment and your cams start to get damaged if you don't catch it.

Luckily, I think I caught it in time. I will have to look at the cams again though to verify. The problem though is that this bike already had the rockers replaced once! Unfortunately, the rockers were replaced with OEM rockers which have the same problem! tell me the logic in that!

So, unfortunately, I was not able to adjust the opener shims as I had to pull all the opening rockers to send off to california cycleworks for an aftermarket megacycles chrome plating...

here's the damage:





So now it looks like I will have to wait at least 2 more weeks to have all this back to me, probably more like 3, plus another 700 bucks!! OUCH...

AND on top of all that, i STILL have a collet probably in my engine that I need to get out! ...

someone buy me a beer... =(