Project Ducati Hypermotard: Part IV, Saving Weight

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The Aviacompositi tail fits great as well.  The factory like fit is a nice touch.

Unfortunately the Desmo Challenge tail is a race only part with no provision for a rear light.  When doing a web search on Hypermotard images on Google we found images of a very clean carbon tail for the Hypermotard with a taillight.  With a little more searching we found the company that made the part, Aviacompositi in Italy.   We sent them an email and to our relief found that they could communicate in English perfectly.  Soon we had a beautiful carbon tail and license plate holder.

The Aviacompositi tail comes with a tailight and all the correct brackets to make installation an easy plug and play affair.

The tail looks awesome and we really feel that this is truly the way the bike should have come from the factory.  Even better, the tail saves 2.5 lbs. from the rear of the bike in a high location as well.  This tail is one of the most satisfying mods we have done so far.

The carbon licence plate holder looks cool and saves weight.

The tail is one of the best looking things you can do to a Hypermotard in our opinion!

Finally we replaced our heavy sealed lead acid stock battery with a high tech lithium ion superlight battery from Braille Battery.  We selected the superlight ML7S battery.  The ML7S weighs only 2 lbs.!  Much lighter than the already light 8.5 lb stock battery.  This gives a savings of 6.5 lbs.!

The high tech Braille lithium ion battery weighs only a hair over 2 lbs.!

The battery fit perfectly in the Ducati’s battery tray, critical because it is a molded in part of the fuel tank that cannot be modified.  The battery is lower profile than stock but we discovered that all we had to do was to flip the stock battery hold down upside down to secure the battery.  The battery is also held in with Velcro strips so we stuck some Velcro to the bottom of the Braille battery so we could use the factory Velcro.

The Braille Battery is lower in profile than the stock battery.

The battery uses a dry chemistry that means it can be held in any orientation and work fine.  It also has the ability to pulse up to 250 amps to give plenty of starting power.  It also has a pretty large capacity of 18 amp hours.  The battery can be fully charged in as little as 10 minutes.  Best of all the battery has a one year warranty, even if used for racing!

To retain the battery, we found if you simply flipped the stock hold down over, it would work just fine!