It takes a certain type of dedication to amass a collection such as you see here, and as this collection of Ducati parts shows, Australian Ian Gowanloch has spent a good part of his life connected to the Ducati brand.
Gowanloch started working with Ducatis in the early 1970s, including time spent as a mechanic at the Oz Ducati importers before setting up his own business a few years later. He built the business up to be the primary Ducati workshop in NSW, specializing in Ducati bevels and belt-drive Pantahs. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he lived in Bologna, Italy, sourcing parts from the various companies that supplied Ducati (CEV, Marzocchi, etc.), as well as from the factory. Along the way, he set up Gowanloch Motorcycle Engineering to supply Ducati parts to the public.
He was able to obtain vast amounts of parts when larger outfits went bust, but it was on a take-it-all basis — hence crates full of 851 pistons, bevel drives, mufflers, seat covers, the list goes on — for more than 16,000 items, in fact.
A bit more than 10 years ago he retired from day-to-day work at GME, started a new business, Italspares, and moved to his farm in the foothills of Australia’s Snowy Mountains, halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. He eventually separated from GME, but kept Italspares going, moving all his parts to the farm: more than 30 tons of everything from complete motorcycles to frames and engine cases — frankly, just about every imaginable part for a Ducati. He already had 10, 40-foot containers full of parts at the farm, and in the years since has been busy building sheds, putting up shelving and slowly unpacking the containers. What you see here is only a mild suggestion of the enormity of the collected parts.
Special thanks to Phil Aynsley. To see more of this amazing collection, visit Phil Aynsley Photography.