Billet Aluminium CNC 3D milled Valve Covers

Dear friends

After contemplating/planing/designing/analysing/bla bla about Styler's thread "http://ducati1299.com/mechanical-technical/23416-safety-wired-valve-cover-bolts.html" I decided to start a new thread.

Styler mentioned that it would be a good thing to safety wire the valve cover bolts (some racers encountered that the screws tend to get loosened).
The OEM bolts do not allow to drill holes into them, there is either no room or the bolts (H-cyl, where the bolts also carry the lower radiator) would get too weak.

So I started to find a nice solution which first ended in designing new stronger bolts that would allow to safety wire them.

But wiring these bolts is still a problem since there is no attachment point on the valve covers. One could do the wiring directly between all 5 bolts but the wires would be too long (too much movement due to length x elasticity). Also there would be some friction between the wires and the magnesium cover which could lead to corrosion to the alloy. And it would look ugly!

So I started to think about redesigning the whole valve cover design.

Conclusion: The best thing in terms of bling factor, racing security compliance and vibration/noise reduction would be to 3D CNC milling new valve covers from special casted aluminium alloy blocks. Okay, bling factor is only about 30%, due to the fact that only the V-cyl head cover would be partially visible.

This would allow to construct mounting points to the covers to properly attach the securing wires in a clean and nice way.

The new custom milled valve covers would have the following features:
+ Improved look, high-tec material, completely Swiss made in a local workshop (top quality, 5 axis CNC milling machine)
+ Anodized instead of painted surface
+ Additional mounting points for safety wires and lugs to position the spark plug wires and for the V-cyl a lug to fixate the main wiring harness
+ Similar rips like on the new R and 1299 covers for improved noise reduction
+ Special Titanium bolts (10 pieces, 6 simpler ones and 4 more complicated) that allow safety wiring
- Slightly higher weight due to the density of the material its milled off

I don't want to get this post to become to lengthy.
In short, after doing some planning I came to the conclusion that it would be possible to start such a project if I had 10 buyers.

With 10 buyers, a valve cover kit would cost 750 USD, with 20 buyers it would cost 650 USD.

A kit would consist of:
1 x H-Cyl valve cover
1 x V-Cyl valve cover
6 x Ti M6 Screw with special head for safety wiring
4 x Ti M6 Screw with special head for safety wiring and mounting thread for the radiator

Anodizing colors for the covers would be either black or silver. I don't recommend other colors since the parts get pretty hot and the color would fade. Also the billet aluminium alloy I would use is a bit difficult for anodization in fancy colors.

Maybe some of you remember some of my last projects and know that quality and design is pretty good

As usual, this would be a non-profit project for me, everything would be done in my spare time. Delivery of the kit would be in March 2016.

Please let my know what you guys think, I'd be happy to get any input from you!!

Gecko:
Awesome skills and fabulous price; but, I think that even thought this may be the best re-engineering fix for loosening valve-cover bolts, it may be too much for me. I mean, I can't justify throwing this much money at it.