My BMW R100GS

I bought it in September 1998 with just over 27,000 miles on the clock from a lawyer (I should have known...) in Daytona. He had put it on the web with some pictures and it looked perfect, so I drove my beaten up old pickup (which my son calls "Old Stinky") to Daytona to have a look. The bike did indeed look great, very clean, everything there, and I bought it for the princely sum of $4,300. The rationale was that this was the first bike I'd ever had with I wouldn't have to work on all the time, so I was willing to pay a little extra (many of my previous bikes I'd got as derelicts for virtually nothing, and somehow manipulated into working order). Funny how things turn out though... Anyway, this was a little cheap for a bike of this type in good condition, so I thought I'd done pretty well. I should have been more suspicious because the guy wouldn't let me use his bathroom but suggested I go urinate in his back garden... strange but true. Of course I'd just driven two hours in this old truck without any air conditioning in the usual 90 degree plus Florida weather, right after a hard day in the lab, so I may have had a slight armpit odoriferous problem.

When I got the bike home it ran fine, but seemed to have a problem charging the battery. Also it leaked oil from the rear wheel housing where the shaft goes into the differential. Both of these were annoying, but I didn't bother too much about them at first anyway. I just charged the battery up every couple of weeks and topped up the differential oil reservoir pretty often. However my brain eventually made me realize that the oil was actually leaking out of the gearbox and sort of dripping down the drive shaft to end up on the rear differential. This was more of a potential problem, so I went to the only BMW guy in town, who shall remain nameless, for obvious reasons as you will see (but who far the sake of arguement we'll refer to as Stan Fridus). He held onto the bike for ages and then replaced an oil seal in the gearbox, which seemed sort or rational at the time. Anyway, it didn't fix the problem, and I was still left leaving an embarrasing old Triumph-like patch of oil wherever I parked, as well as always having a big glob of oil on the rear wheel. About this time I had the first real problem, the starter motor totally disintegrated, and I had to buy a new one for about $500. This was a French unit, a Valeo device, and I was wondering if I should have put a good old kraut Bosch unit in instead, but the frenchie has been O.K. since. I since heard that the Bosch starter just isn't man enough to turn over a 1000cc engine, so it's probably good I didn't. Anyway, this got me into the business of taking things off the Beemer, which I eventually got quite good at. The GS went O.K. for a while more, then one day after I'd had it for about a year, it started to make a very loud clanking noise, after which it stopped completely (fortunately I was doing 10mph on a dirt road on not 100mph on I75 when this happened). I loaded the bike into my pickup truck and took if off to the same local BMW guy, who sat on it for about three months, so eventually I got bored with waiting and took it back to do it myself. I must thank this guy (who shall still remain nameless, but who for the sake of arguement I'll still refer to as Stan Fridus) for providing me with the motivation to learn BMWing. Anyway, it turned out that the shaft drive had actually broken. You'd think BMW would know how to make a functional shaft drive by now, having been in the shaft driven motorcycle business for about a century now, but in fact the R100GS used a new and evilly pernicious type of rear suspension/shaft drive called a paralever. This, unlike all earlier (reliable) BMWs which only have one universal joint, has two universal joints. For whatever reason they designed this badly and the shaft breaks usually at the front universal joint at about 30,000 miles (mine lasted to about 35,000). BMW never fixed this problem on this model line, even though bikes of this kind were on the market for several years. They did fix it when they brought out the new four valve head oil cooled boxer motors a few years ago, and one option is to get the whole rear end off one of those and put it on your old R100GS. You can also actually buy a shaft off a Humvee or Jumbo jet or something that will do the job a lot better than the BMW thing from a company called Eurotech in California. Anyway I put a new BMW shaft in (~$450, the Eurotech one is $700 or somethin, which I probably should have invested in) and at the same time tried to fix the annoying leak from the gearbox, which turned out to be due to all the bearings being extremely loose, so putting in a new seal wouldn't help at all since the gear shafts were wobbling all over the place. This was probably because someone had run it without enough oil (since oil was leaking out of the gearbox all the time this could actually have been me I suppose, but I'm pretty sure this problem predated my appearance on the scene). Anyway, I put a some new bearings in and got the bike together and it ran O.K, not leaking oil, for a few thousand more miles, but then started to jump out of gear. At this point I lost patience with it, as the gearbox was a real pain to work on, and just bought a second hand R80 gearbox (identical to the R100GS gearbox) and put that in (another $500, should have done that in the first place). Now it doesn't leak oil and doesn't jump out of gear, and it will be a while before the new shaft drive breaks.

Since then I've had no more really serious mechanical problems, unless you count the speedometer, which for some reason went out at just after 40,000 miles (new one $250). In the meantime I put in new carbon brushes onto the alternator and a new diode board (~$90) one or other or possibly both or maybe something else entirely meaning that the battery charges fine now, better than ever before in fact. And then it had the annoying problem of stopping in the rain or in times of high humidity, which can be very inconvenient in summer in Florida I can tell you, since it rains all the time. Basically it would rain and 2-3 minutes later the bike would just stop dead, so I would wheel it under a tree or into a gas station or somewhere, and then 15 minutes later it would start right up again. I couldn't understand this for ages, but finally traced it to hair line cracks in the ignition coils, which allowed shorting onto the frame if there was any water around. I filled the cracks with Epoxy resin, and that improved things somewhat but did n't really totally solve the problem. So I got a new ignition coil (~$150) and, joy of joys, it now runs in the rain! Oh yes and then the rear shock went out, dripping oil all over the back wheel, so I thought the damned gear box oil seal had gone again. The worst thing about this was that oil got into the left rear pivot axle and this axel started to unscrew (possibly I hadn't tightened it enough), but this was scarry since the back wheel could eventually have fallen off, a fairly serious problem on a motorcycle. Anyway the bike was pogoing up and down since the damper in the shock wasn't working at all and because the axle was loose the wheel was also wobbling left and right. Actually a friend of mine, Floyd, borrowed the bike in this state (we hadn't noticed the axle problem), and actually passed his motorcycle test on it, a tribute to his skills, possibly. A new shock absorber and ton of loctite fixed the problems, though the new shock was ~$450. And also the solenoids that control the funny fuel system jammed up til I cleaned them up, might have to buy new ones of those sometime. Finally a few little switches, lights, cables etc. have messed up, but I figure if you ride motorcycles at all you're probably the sort of person who likes suffering and punishment. But apart from all these problems the bike has been great.... Although recently I took the cylinder heads off since compression seemed to be down in one cylinder (90 psi, the other one was 115 psi), so I'll put new piston rings in and also pushrod seals, which have been leaking for a while. The positive side of all this is that there is relatively little that can go wrong now that I wouldn't have some idea about dealing with at the side of the road. In the last few years I haven't ridden it too much, often because it has one silly problem or another, and I have these other bikes that basically work fine. However, as of today (4/6/06) it is up to over 51,000 miles, which is sort of quite getting on a bit for a motorcycle. You don't often see motorcycles in the US anyway with more than about 50,000 miles on the clock- of course it is almost 20 years old now.