Can anyone explain how this works?

A metal rod (separate to the shock) to adjust ride height.

Struggling to see how this works without affecting the movement of the shock.

I've been looking at the pics in Bike magazine of the Ducati 1098 and the rod attaches to the top of the swingarm and a casting from the top of the shock.

Can't see the casting properly but it must be part of a linkage to stop it affecting shock movement and in that case increasing/decreasing the length of the rod would only move the linkage and not change the ride height.

Does anyone know how this works? I've only seen it on a race Ducati and the new one, and never in the flesh.

Or should I seek professional help for even caring?

I think you will find that Dukes have had them a while (mates 748 had one) it is used as a way to compensate for vertical movement when adjusting chain due to having an eccentric hub.

If you bang in 'eccentric hub' and 'tie rod adjustment' in to a search engine you are bound to come across an explanation of how it adjusts the angle of the dangle without effecting much else …

[Sid Squid]

Instead of the two tie bars, (commonly referred to as 'Dog Bones') that the SV suspension uses, (a similar arrangement to that which most modern Japanese monoshock systems use), the Ducati has only one link and it's a rod, having the rod split into two pieces and the joint between them being threaded, it's length is adjustable, thus altering the ride height in the same way as people fit different length tie bars to their SV in order to mess up the suspension geometry.

Cheers guys,

got this from google: www.ducati.net - but there's no diagrams but from the explanations I can see why it's there.

Now, why don't they just use locking rings/nuts on the shock mount? And do you think there's a market for threaded dog bones to alter the suspension linkage ratio?

[Sid Squid]

Where the original bike doesn't have provision for ride height adjustment independent of preload adjustment, the better quality aftermarket shocks sometimes have one end eye/fork threaded for precisely that reason.
Adjustable tie bars for the SV: I don't think this is a good move due the necessity of making sure they were both absolutely identically adjusted so that the bearings in the linkage didn't have any out of true load placed on it.
Changing the length of the tie bars doesn't alter the suspension ratio, the easiest way change the ratio, (for any given length shock; changing the shock length will alter the position in the rate curve ever so slightly, but not the rate itself precisely), would be to fit a linkage with different centres.