John’s Ducati 900SSie special

This dazzling motorcycle began life as one of the 900SSie models designed by Pierre Terblanche. But pretty much all that remains is the dash, the engine and the swing arm.

The frame is by an American chap called Walt Siegl, who builds very classy Ducati specials. John reports that Walt prefers to build complete bikes, but did sell a few frames – and this is one of them. He snapped it up in the UK from someone who’d already bought it, and set about making a complete bike.

By the time he brought it to the RR workshop it was almost complete. He’d had a go at the wiring but concluded it was too complicated. After the first week I tended to agree. As usual, it’s not the electrical complexity that fries your head. It’s finding the best way to run the wires around the bike. It’s like three dimensional chess – you are trying to make it reliable, elegant, largely invisible, and protected from heat and snagging on sharp edges. You also want to make individual components capable of being removed and replaced.

I try to make every loom as elegant as I can, but this frame was a real challenge. Once you’ve fitted and rewired all the main electrical devices the space for the ‘loom’ is about three inches long! So you just have to run individual wires connecting them all up. It took me almost 70 hours. At least the wiring is largely hidden once all the bodywork is on.

The lights are all LEDs, with a halo running light and Frenched-in indicators. These helped a lot by reducing the overall current draw, and allowing many of the cables to be tiny little 11 amp ones, reducing the total cable volume. If I could get a good range of colours I would use even skinnier 8 amp wires, but generally they only come in black and red.

The bike’s next stop is BSD Performance in Eye Green, Peterborough. They will build up a custom fuel system (the original bike had a fuel pump in the tank), and remap the ECU to suit the big-bore, high-compression pistons John has fitted. I can’t wait to see it run.