😒 You need to be prepared to bear the consequences of a risky decision...

This is not going to be a cheery, happy, let's laugh at my life post but rather an update on the repair progress with the LC.

So to start off my weekend I received a call from the BMW dealer telling me that the rewound stator is not producing sufficient voltage. At idle it is producing around 2.4V AC and at revs is gets up to ±9V AC. With the coils measuring correctly in terms of resistance and balance between the phases it seems the most likely culprit is the sequence or number of turns per pole of the stator. The magnets were checked and passed a visual inspection. Even on the old stator the one phase was giving ±20V AC on idle which supports the theory that the magnets are operating correctly.

I can take the stator back to the rewinder to get it redone but he would need an example to compare it with as his notes are obviously flawed. That can be arranged but the labour to remove and reinstall the stator is limiting my options. I do not have a test rig to confirm if the rewound stator is working so it would be another risk I'm taking to install the 2nd rewind and have the bike partially assembled to be able to start it again and test the complete generator.

At this point I also cannot leave the bike in spares at the BMW dealer, taking their space for too long. It has to be fixed or I need to collect the complete bike in spares and leave it in my garage for a while until I have a better plan. Most likely I will have to bite the bullet and pay for the original repair quote of ±R23k plus whatever labour the technician spent on this partial assembly, test and disassembly. 

I'm sure there are some financial calculations available to decide on when to repair or replace a component, calculate the risk involved, the time value of money etc. but I thought that the risk was low enough for this to be taken as a viable option. The likelihood of success for my decision was never 100% but I felt at least 80% comfortable that is would work. Obviously you need to be prepared to suffer the consequences of the other 20% coming true, as it did for me.

I can only hope that the rest of the week will yield more positive results.

Regards

FFS :(

 Just as I was getting back into riding, Murphy has decided to strike again. This time the bike left the rider (not me as I was driving a backup vehicle) in a little town in the Eastern Cape called Rhodes with no tar roads and pretty much no mobile phone service either.

After an extended period of trying to get the bike started and keeping it running down the mountain pass into Rhodes it seemed that the bike was not charging the battery anymore 😞 . Luckily this was during a tour with the local BMW dealership and after a 3 hour recovery drive over Naude's Neck Pass with the backup vehicle I was able to get to my stranded bike and the unlucky rider. Of the three phases in the stator, all of them were measuring down to ground (probably due to the star point) and only one phase gave the required voltage at idle (±20V AC). This means that at least two phases were gone.

So after some diagnosis the next day at the stay over, the charging coils were determined to be faulty and this is apparently a somewhat frequent issue on the 2015 (or there about) LC motorcycles with no recall from BMW. With no repair options in the area and the scope of the work (I'll get into that below), the bike completed the remaining 2500km of the planned 3500km on the trailer. Best fuel consumption I ever got, 3500km on about 60l of petrol in the LC 😉.

Dropping it off at the dealer after the trip was done, and I was done contemplating the sale/replacement/throwing away of the LC, I decided to have the bike repaired with a rewound stator. The faulty unit is shown below.

The stator is burnt out at the toppish part of the unit but the real kicker is the replacement. The OEM (in their infinite wisdom) only sells the stator (called a generator on the quote) for an eye watering R14k since it comes paired with a new flywheel. Why in the name of all that is holy would you do that? The flywheel has no flipping reason for requiring replacement and the taper lock and Loctite® makes the removal of it a massive undertaking. This means in practice that it would be better to undo the three bolts keeping the stator in place and taking the new flywheel as a door stopper or wall plate 😵 like grandma used to have. I could put it next to the crankshaft I wrote off and make a collection I guess 😃.

Coming back to the pricing, I could possibly get a 2nd hand unit (of unknown reliability) for R7k (the guys obviously know what a new one costs) or do a rewind of the old unit. The pricing for rewinding of the unit varies from ±R1250 to ±R3400. Some of the rewinds do come with a 3 month warranty but the issue is not that cost, it is the fitment cost of the stator on the bike. Since the LC (and all 1200 GS models) basically has a longitudinally mounted drivetrain, with the gearbox behind the engine, the engine has to be removed from the frame for the installation 😱. And since the stator is mounted in between the engine and gearbox that has to be split as well along with some disassembly of the engine. Depending on the dealer and how much they are willing to assist with this in terms of cost, the labour runs ±R9k.

So, what do you do now? Install a rewound stator for R1250 with a 3 months warranty and hope it lasts for longer than that or go for the R14k OEM part since the labour is going to be another ±R9k if the rewound unit fails anyway 😓. I don't like adulting anymore.

After doing some questionable market research (posting on Think Bike) I decided to go the rewind route and see what I get. I managed to get my hands on another failed stator that I could rewind first and determine if it was good enough to have it installed. A shout out to the BMW dealer for assisting with testing of the rewound stator free of charge before I decided on the fate of the LC. I can attest to the fact that I do not have the best motorcycle in the world or that BMW in not necessarily the best brand, but the dealership makes a massive difference in my experience with the product. If it was not for them I would have moved to something else a long time ago. I have colleagues that have done 90k on their LCs with minimal issues but I also use the dual purpose of the LC where they do not. I don't think my riding style has anything to do with this failure but perhaps the low speed, technical riding does allow some heat build-up. Having said that, that is why the bike has oil, an oil cooler, water, a radiator and rev limiter etc. 

Anyway, the rewound stator is shown below.

The rewinder did not have the exact thickness of wire required so he had to use two different sized wires to get to the same cross sectional area to ensure that the resistance is correct across the three phases and also that they are in balance (which is more of a concern as the resistance should be 0 - 3ohm per phase).  The rewind was obviously not done by a machine but with the measurements being correct the bike is now in pieces at the dealer and the rewound stator is being installed. The hope is that the stator will produce the correct voltage and last long enough for me to feel that I have gotten back some of the money that I am spending on this repair.

It is unfortunately not sustainable to keep spending this kind of money on a low mileage bike but I am betting on this being the last costly failure for a while. With the new LC running around R330k according to the BMW Motorrad website it becomes debatable whether an upgrade is worth it. Especially since I only ride tar roads to get to the gravel ones. Taking that kind of money off-road is not an easy feeling. It probably changers after the first time you drop it but no one wants to do that unnecessarily. I am test riding some other brands in the meantime as I cannot sell this one for a reasonable price if it is not repaired. I also don't want to pass on a faulty bike to another rider. I'll make sure this one is functional and that the stator has proven itself before making the final sell/keep decision. If it does fail again I'm not sure what I will do, but selling it for parts is one option or I'll have to pay for a new stator/flywheel with the associated ±R23k parts and labour cost. Perhaps I should make a post of my test ride(s) as I can't go riding anyway😀. 

Until next time...

9 years, seriously?

 Sooo.... 9 odd years seem to be enough time between posts. Wouldn't want to flood the readers with 'content' and according to the 'influencers' (how did this become a thing anyway; probably due to participation trophies) you should always leave people wanting more. A crap ton of stuff has happened in the last few years and none of it was really important. 

Things that once seemed worthy of attention and worry is now long forgotten and ultimately meaningless. Meh, that's the way life unfolds I guess. The girl you gawked at as a young man now wears an extra support brasier to combat gravity and she is still, frustratingly so, out of your league 😢. 

Anyway, the daft Labrador is a memory long gone which made way for some time without a scooter which ultimately led to my wife telling me to please buy another bike because I was allegedly irritable, unreasonable, inattentive and some other stuff I can't remember 🙂. Cue stage left and enter the 2015 BMW GS1200LC.

The change was pleasant enough and after adding some off-road protection along with the obligatory Acropocavich slip-on (this is the correct Eastern European pronunciation 👍), the Mud Slug was ready to go and conquer what the Labrador could not achieve.

I'll leave the part where the main bearings stuck onto the crankshaft and a few other issues for another day's lament. Subsequent to this catastrophe the bike was in neat piles again at the local BMW dealer and I decided to wrap it whilst I had the separate body parts at hand.

I eventually went for a scheme along the lines of the BWM M colours and it came out pretty descent. It does seem to give some protection in terms of scratches and the inevitable tumble down some dodgy mine dump that is apparently radioactive if the sign boards are to be believed 😐. It has held up well over time and the fade seems acceptable considering the UV exposure we get here in the good old RSA. 

To bring this post to an abrupt end, that was enough of an update for now, see you in another 9 years.. probably.

Transformer, GSA style

There are just so many hours a day that one man can fill with hard work, or any work for that matter. Eight hours a day at graft during this time of the year is absolute murder. All the nice chickies are on leave and the ones left makes me barricade my office door from the inside. (None of them read the forum…. I hope). There I am, a somewhat scary man in my early thirties, hiding from the acting boss whilst ordering my minions to do the slave labour they were made for. Let them work the fields whilst I command my massive labour force (just four okes actually) from my air conditioned office to achieve milestone after milestone for which I will take all the credit. Aahh, life just cannot get better than this? Or can it? Yes, yes I say to myself. Soon I will throw off the shackles of employment and before I trudge home to the ball-and-chain of eternal love I will have two full hours of GS madness ahead of me. I will be riding through the meadows, waiving at damsels and then…. leave them behind. Why leave them behind you may ask, you leave them behind because soon they will begin to nag and slow you down. It’s inevitable, their like a black hole drawing a white dwarf closer and closer (this is apparently physics not soft porn, no editing required).

In the middle of my yearning for graft to end, I suddenly remember what my mother once told me. She said that men don’t get old; it’s only our toys that get more expensive. So what did almost every boy have or perhaps want? A transformer. Now, I’m not talking about the guy in Brakpan sitting on his fold-up chair whilst having an epileptic attack, no, I am talking about a machine that in the blink of an eye can change from something beautiful and sleek to something awe inspiring. In front of your eyes the mundane changes into something that you never thought possible, not even in your wildest dreams. I had the privilege this past Friday to experience this first hand.

I started off with this: Beautiful and sleek

And five minutes later I ended up with this: Awe inspiring

How could this happen? I pondered this for about 2 hours whilst being stuck in the rain after dark on an abandoned road with the bike refusing to start. It is quite simple actually, I blame Hitler. Having not been very interested in history at school I found myself now reading up on zhe (read any ‘Z’ with a German accent) little German for no apparent reason. How he used his dark charisma to bring us the Holocaust, the VW Beetle and the GSA. So, when I saw the flooded farm road ahead of me I thought I could crush it like the Luftwaffe! But alas, I was sitting on top of a U-boat and not a Messerschmitt. About halfway through the 30m section of water the Messerschmitt lost its direction and did an emergency dive. I did a belly flop (about 8 out of 10) to the right and the U-boat went left. Before I could get the kill switch, it managed to commit suicide by drowning. Standing up next to my sunken vessel the water was at knee’s height. I righted the bike, spent the next 30 minutes pushing it out of the water/mud and up a muddy hill to where I could actually put it on the main stand. I tried to get as much water out of the engine as possible for a desperate last-time start, I didn’t get it all. When the GSA did turn over, zhe starter emitted a spine chilling, satanic wolf scream that only Jamie Lee Curtis could properly imitate. Together we spent the next 25km in relative silence as we nursed each other home; me with a newly acquired throat infection and the GSA with something a little more life threatening.

Below is the GSA in the expensive care unit at BMW Motorrad.

The damage above is just over R10k and I will only have the U-boat back in 2013 due to the insurance assessors closing for the year.
All this before even paying the 1^st instalment on the bike.

Somewhere in this there is probably a very valuable lesson that can be learned.
I’m still laughing so maybe that is why I can’t see it (apart from the obvious plug spanner I will now add to my tool kit).
In the end it was still a crap load of fun!!!

RIP: Dog of War

I picked up the latest edition of the Superbike mag in the shops the other day.
The main feature for December is the battle royale for the best bike of 2012.
The middle of page 30 reads: "The GS is like a big daft Labrador. It doesn't care where it is, it's just happy to be out in the fresh air."

After reading this I decided that "my" GS is no Labrador.... so I named her Dog of War
Ha Ha..... Nothing was going to get in the way of Dog of War.

To my surprise changing the name of something apparently doesn't change its nature...... (sound familiar to any other married men??? )

So being new to the whole adventure scene I am still enjoying this a lot. The previous owner of my GS did 1579km in two years, I have done 1300km in the 8 days that I have had the scooter. This translates into "looking" for stuff to ride through and over etc......

With this in mind, look at Dog of War below. I was travelling in the opposite direction that the bike is now facing. Riding on a dry patch of road and then deciding to move over to the slightly muddy part (because I am now an explorer and conqueror of worlds) was not the best idea I have had.

I had time to take a quick snap with the cell before I saw a family with a caravan behind their car approaching. In one manly expression of raw power (please read as: tried to pick the fat bike up three times) I righted the GS in time to wave the vacationers on their way.

This was the end of Dog of War, welcome back my daft Labrador