This is a collection of experience and incidents such as I can remember some of my misspent youth and thrash through my later years.
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
Life With an Aging Motorcycle – Or, which part of this bike will wear out next? My Life With a 2004 BMW 1150 GS Adventure
This part will complete this series and with it my history with this bike.
2010 saw another work travel motorcycle trip to Everett. This time I’d have functional GPS.
The rear brake pedal stopped working the brake light which ended up being some sort of wear. I replaced the whole thing with a Touratech piece and the problem went away along with the bad tail lamp problem returning.
2010 mileage a month after the purchase anniversary, 10/23/2010
For 2011, the starter button stopped working consistently. It had been documented these get dirty. Tedious work, but fairly simple. The grey button on top of the switch cluster, with the red kill switch around its base.
The view of the inside after removing the cluster and the inside of the assembly.
The internal switch contacts with the just visible corrosion.
That all cleaned up and reassembled never to have another issue with it.
Next was the final drive bearings. These were always a problem on these bikes it seemed. A friend had his fail multiple times to where he finally fixed the bike and sold it immediately. The tell was first play at the wheel then sliver flakes of metal in the gear oil. I pulled the final drive and dropped it at a dealer since I did not have the tooling to deal with the bearings or shimming. I would be back under the back end of this bike to replace the driveshaft I hadn’t bothered to check this time beyond a quick feel of the u-joint play, finding none.
The drive shaft failed in spectacular fashion on my morning commute while accelerating hard from a metered on-ramp a mile from my house.
When this broke I was just about to enter morning rush hour traffic on one of the busiest freeways in Southern California. The rear wheel locked and I slid the bike into the narrow “V” between the traffic lanes and ramp thanks to cars passing me on the right while honking of course. The broken loose drive shaft being rotated by the rear wheel had lodged itself against the insides of the swinging arm and locked the rear wheel. Big fun to slid and steer a motorcycle in morning rush hour traffic.
The damage took the drive shaft of course along with cracking the swinging arm. The swinging arm was not available in the US and was on backorder with no estimated date of arrival. A friend found one at an online breaker and I scooped it up along with a new driveshaft assembly and pivot pin since that had been damaged as well.
The cracks in the swinging arm are harder to see in the external paint, but inside, where I could never get a good photo, they were alarming.
With a fresh swinging arm from an online breaker, a new drive shaft and parts from BMW assembly began.
The tail light melting reared its ugly self once again.
The rear light was finally replaced with an LED setup that functioned perfectly. The tank stickers were looking very tired. Fresh reflective stickers were ordered.
A bit of warming with a heat gun and the tank was clear.
They turned out quite nice.
The wires to the bar switches had begun to crack and split. I went back and forth about what to do as a repair. I ended up with buying heat shrink and not shrinking it.
I had to remove all the pins from the connectors in order to slide the new overbraid on.
The final product came out nice.
My last odometer reading of 2011 is from November 15th at 175,007 miles.
More repairs to the poorly designed Touratech valve cover protectors.
The final drive, swinging arm and drive shaft were all pulled off to inspect the output seal. It was fine.
No idea what had caused the filth to accumulate under the transmission and leave a mist along the side, but once cleaned up it never appeared again.
My last odometer for 2012 was taken December 9th at 185,641 miles.
2012 had me spending abut half the year on business travel, then on extended travel for business on the bike itself. Because of both of those things I did the absolute minimum of repairs and service.
2013 had me on the bike way from home on work beginning around February. I replaced the second battery in the bike with an Anti Gravity.
While on travel a fork seal began slushing a mess, so that had to be sorted.
One of my weekend rides back home had me repairing the Touratech valve cover guards, yet again.
Then on a weekend ride home through the now well heated up desert, (leaving Phoenix after work on a Friday is never going to be nice.) had my engine oil sight glass failing in Quartzite. Luckily enough at a fuel station with all the fuel pumps non-functional.
The ambient temperatures were hovering around 113°F. An hour wait for the tow truck and trailer to haul the bike a few miles into California to Blithe. Then five hours more waiting for my wife to get me with the daughters Miata, then driving that back four and a bit hours made for a very long end to a twelve hour workday. Of course once home a friend and I headed back to Blithe the very next morning armed with a rental pickup, ramps, straps and a brand new sight glass after stopping by a dealer that happened to be only a little out of the way.
The repair is simple enough, so short work was made of the task the next day. This would be day three of a two day weekend that ended up stretching well into the following week as I wanted to double check the repair and getting a bit more done at my home office.
At this point I’m burning vacation days away from work, but still participating in meetings via phone and answering queries in support of the task at hand.
It turned out the fault was likely the thermostat for the oil cooler, as that had failed.
This required ordering the part over in Phoenix at the dealer on the opposite side of town from my worksite.
The work was managed after a few days wait for parts, (9 year old motorcycle), in the parking lot of my hotel.
Next up was the clutch master cylinder that had begun to feel sketchy. Close inspection revealed some wear.
Of course a new part was stupidly expensive. A lightly used master cylinder, complete with lever and fasteners was sourced again from an online breaker for far less than new.
Good as new.
By now, I was back home with some time to deal with things so the headers got a long neglected freshening up.
As long as I was making things pretty, I replaced the browning BMW screen with a Moose Racing screen.
The very last thing to address was the GPS mount that had all of its multilane mounts rot.
Around this time I began to seriously consider what my future with the bike would be. I was pretty sure the bike would benefit from a complete going through. I didn’t expect a lot of major problems, but maybe the rings had a bit more wear than would be nice. Valve guides might need freshening. Certainly the chain guide and tensioners would do with replacement after near 200,000 miles. Likely a clutch since it had been 100,000 miles since the last. An accounting of parts costs and tools to complete this and figuring I’d have the bike off the road for at least a month and likely much more than that given my hectic work and travel schedule I estimated around $1,500 in parts and tools at the time and all those weekends and maybe an evening or two.
That just didn’t seem like a great idea or fun.
The decision was made then to sell the bike.
That was the end of my ownership with the bike. I sold it and went off looking for the next, last bike. August 5th 2013. The end of my BMW Adventure era.
A screen shot of a spreadsheet that has long gone missing cataloging annual mileage.
In going through this history I was stuck by how much work I did that wasn’t just regular maintenance. I did do a lot of that with oil changes and valve checks every 5,000 miles. Those always included checking the throttle body balance and idle. Tires lasted around 10,000 miles, whether I was riding TKC80’s or some 50/50 tire.
I sold the bike the fifth of September, 2013 and bought a very lightly used 2010 KTM 990 Adventure R. The KTM is my current motorcycle and absolutely my last motorcycle.
My thoughts looking back:
All in all I liked the 1150 GS Adventure for what I used it for. The standard GS would have fit better, but all the trips I took that involved riding long distances on interstate benefited from that big tank and the big flat seat. That seat and screen fit me perfectly. BMW’s bend at the wrist has never felt right for my wrists. The big adventure being no different. It would have been fine to have a bit narrower bar for my purposes. Maintenance routine is simple, but the crashbars and baseplate require more fiddling and keeping track of a lot of little fasteners. Keeping a bike beyond five years is probably not a good idea today given how dealers are pressed by economics and space to not carry much more than very routine maintenance items. After I had sold the bike I found two other bikes of the same vintage, but barely used. One had less than 20,000 miles and the other nearly half that. And they were priced reasonably. I nearly bought one of them. It would have been a great fly/ride again. In the end I was wooed by my heart. I had wanted a KTM 950 Adventure back when they came out. It looked so light and right. I toyed with getting another sport bike and this time with no thought of a pillion. But, after a few test rides I determined my aging body had outlived that level of flexibility. And I did still need to commute. I never really jelled with the Jessie Luggage. they mount system doesn’t support the lower part of the bag that well so they can rotate slightly toward the wheel. I never had an issue and the rotation was barely noticeable, but there was wear over the course of 200,000 miles. I had replaced the gasket that formed the lid seal once on each bag. One lock broke loose from the retaining epoxy. Both things were easy to mend. The top grills were dumb. I’d have used loops instead if I’d been the original owner. The bags never leaked. They swallowed more gear and equipment that probably should be carried. I was not sure I’d like top loading bags when I got the bike but, I was converted and would not go back to side loading. It was too bad Pirelli discontinued the Scorpion tire in the 19/17 sizes that was my favorite tire on the bike. BMW heated grips are no match for Oxford. I really liked the BMW Adventure top case of all the top cases I’ve ever used in fifty years of riding. Waterproof, easily swallows an XD IV adventure helmet with room to spare for small items. I never liked the front suspension of the 1150 or any of the 1200’s. It always felt vague. And the powered ABS brakes were never as good as the brakes on my CBR900RR. The wave rotors from Braking were an improvement as was my learning how to bleed the brakes because two dealers never got it right. But, the brakes were never quite the feel of proper brakes. The Ohlines shocks were rebuilt about every 45 to 60,000 miles. I should have installed those from day one. I never liked the Garmin 2610 Street Pilot GPS. It was an utter pain to deal with. I had it repaired/rebuilt twice. By the time I sold the bike Garmin was no longer supporting it and it had stopped reading my USGS maps. Offline navigation apps were just coming to smartphones around then.
Owning the 1150 Adventure was a good time for the most part and I miss it.
Along The Way 