Monster sizing

As most of you know, we sold Amanda’s Ducati a number of months ago, for a myriad of reasons.  Well it didn’t go too far, as the guy who bought it is one of the LTs in my unit.  Well, since he doesn’t have a better half restricting his modification urges, he wanted to do the very common Monster tail-chop operation to clean up the rear of the bike.  However, he doesn’t have a garage or enough tools yet, so he came by today for some mechanical mayhem.  He had already put bar-end mirrors on, and had cleaned up the huge rear fender, but the ‘beer tray’ piece and stock lights were still all in place.  Here’s what it looked like stock:

First, we had to pull the seat and get the wiring disconnected:

Being mid-day, the camera couldn’t decide whether or not to use the flash, which made for a couple of ‘meh’ pictures.  Of course at night the flash reflected off the plates pretty bad…rrgh.

Anywho, after disassembly it progressed pretty quickly to the ‘chop’ portion of the ‘tail-chop’.  Here’s the rear section prepped with painter’s tape to guard and mark the cut points:

And, since I was more comfortable with the tools, here I am doing the deed:

I had wanted to do this to the bike when we owned it, but SWMBO wouldn’t let me.  Such is life.  Here’s the rear sub-frame minus the last 6 1/4″:

The next bit involved a lot of test-assembly, head-scratching, re-reading of directions, rinse, repeat.  We finally broke down and headed in to the computer to pull up the photos from the company he bought the bracket kit from to see what it was supposed to look like assembled.  We ended up mounting the license plate mounting piece off the bottom of the cross brace rather than in between the tail-light and the turn signal brackets because if we had done it according to the directions, the plate would have been at about a 15% down-angle from parallel to the ground.  Pretty sure that would have caused a comment and critique session from Officer Friendly, so we improvised and got everything mounted up cleanly with some of the spare spacers and grommets left over from the deleted tail section.  Here’s what the buttoned-up tail looks like:

Much, much cleaner than stock!

After that we installed some frame-sliders, a set of NICE Rizoma grips, and matching signals for the front of the bike (which needed one replaced anyway due to a zero-speed gravel parking-lot ‘oops’).  Here she is all put back together:

He had also already done bar-end mirrors like the ones I have on the Superhawk, cored and painted the exhaust cans, and added some carbon-fiber side panels and heel-guards, so the Duc is definitely looking clean and mean.  Not too shabby for an afternoon’s worth of work.