888LTD

My first DesmoQuattro was a 1993 888 SP0. I promptly put staintune pipes on it and drove it as hard as I could. In doing so I also blew a belt on a cold day and had to completely rebuild the motor. I was 22 years old and was fairly fearless. While the bike was apart I decided to do some drop in performance upgrades. I called Earlnado and asked him about the 12.5:1 FBF units he had. He suggested them as the bike gets much nastier up top. So it began.

During this time, I was trying to get the Doc to stop buying american iron. He was on his second Harley powered machine and I was starting to fear for his and Woodman's lives. As many of my friends will tell you, I am a very bad influence. I am also very good at digging on the net. As per my normal fashion, I started sending Wally links to craigslist ads. As it was, 888s were getting more and more rare. This was around 2006 and I was only able to find one or two anywhere in the world for sale.

After a few months, the perfect machine popped up in Washington DC. Better yet, it was a 1994 LTD, the last of the last.

Doc and Woodman went to the back, then to Uhaul, then to DC. What they returned with was a very nice looking, completely stock 888LTD #84 with about 6000 ticks on the clock. This was around the time I started racing so when I got on the bike I was shocked with the lack of suspension and braking this thing had on the front end. Getting off a race setup bike and getting a street machine usually makes a bike seem like a Laz-ee-boy but in this case it was more like a wet noodle.

Right off the bat I suggested full floating rotors, woody clip ons and to rebuild the front end. The Doc decided to go a few steps past that. About a month later, I was handed and custom Ohlins R&T front end from a Suzuki 600 with 916 Lowers and radial mounts. Additionally he handed me a set of spanking Brembo Radial calipers, two Radial Masters and a set of woodies. Wholey $4k in one Pop but man how to do things right! The reason from the custom R&T was because the Doc wanted to keep the stock triples with the LTD name badge. This also forced me to custom machine reservoir mounts.

I don't have shots of the original machine when we pulled it from the truck but here is the bike after it's first run through. As you can see, the bike has the LTD Carbon Fenders, Carbon Pipes and the Color matched rear suspension loop.

We road the bike for a season in this form. It performed tip top and was nothing but fun for Doc and Woodman. We did have some issues tough. To start, one day Doc called me to inform me that he had a pool of oil under his bike. After inspection I found that the source was the starter. We took the left side cover off and found that one of the starter bolts had backed out and had caused the leak. While in there, I noticed that the timing jackshart had a broken tab. Looking for the piece more, I found it in one of the lower oil gallies. It seems someone in Italy was in a rush when they put this motor together. If your not careful when placing the left side cover on a water cooled bike, you can break off one of the jackshaft fingers with the water pump feed shaft.

We buttoned the bike back up but I mention to Wally that we would need to do some motor work to fix this. I always open my big mouth! I found an 851 motor and we decided to goto town on it rather then play around with the original 888 motor. We promptly bought the very same 12.5:1 Pistons I had in my bike, Alum Flywheel, new Belts and a few other bits. We sent the pistons and jugs to Millennium coatings for boring and coating. At the time of build we also oppted to go with a 748 close ratio transmission (just because I had all the time in the world and wanted to split the cases on this bike! not).

All built, we pulled the stock motor out of the 888 and placed in the new 888 Evil twin screamer. With a new Chip from FBF, we see major improvements in low, mid and high RPMS on this motor, happily spinning to 11K. What a motor. Once we put the bike back on the road we road her for a few months and then sent her to GMD Boston to have the numbers checked. I later received a call from Peter Kates that made my day go dark. This 888 was tucked in like none other!

I had just rebuilt this damn thing twice and now I was REALLY going to have to rebuild it. From this point on I started taking more pictures of the build.

This is the last time this thing looked stock for the rest of it's life. (aside from the 5 spokers I had just mounted on it)

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