That was on the Alaska Highway near Destruction Bay on the way back from a tour of Alaska. Forks fractured at 85mph, compound arm fracture, tortuous medevac back to Seattle for emergency surgery. Lucky it happened in the wilderness and not in heavy freeway traffic, though.



More here.

Crash in Destruction Bay, YT - ADVrider

I figure if anybody is going to have seen or heard of anything like that, it will be people going RTW on the bikes.

BMW uprated the design of the forks sometime around the end of 2002 and early 2003 after small spate of these, apparently - the new forks are much beefier than the old ones in the area that failed above, so if you ride a bike with the beefier forks you don't have anythuing to be concerned about as far as I know.

Ive read the thread on advrider.com...All i can say is that im happy i dont own a pre-2002 GS, or id worry everytime i took it out for a spin.

What makes me furious is the way BMW handled the incident, simply stating: "you must have hit something"!!!

Ive never heard of anybodys wheel coming off at 85mph regardless of make, but i have heard of stress-cracks on different bikes mainly in the frame though.
But apparently at least one other GS-rider have experienced the forks disintegrating at speed...scary!

I think we are up to about ten distinct identified cases in that thread now, with pictures in hand for five of them. Of the seven incidents where what happened is known, none occurred in heavy traffic (presumably this is why the riders are still alive to tell the tale), all bar one resulted in injury, and of the remaining six, the score as far as we know is one slight injury, four serious injuries and one very serious injury indeed.

Only one of the failures that details are available happened in any kind of collision - the rider hit a dog that darted into the road at about 40mph, the forks failed on one side and the rider was chucked off. The others have all been spontaneous failures, including the guy who had his forks catastrophically fail just like this on Ruta 40 in Argentina back in 2001 and suffered a broken neck for his trouble.

This is just typical for BMW and I continue to wonder why they can't get the basics right.

I crossed the Sahara on a Yamaha RD350 in 1978, closely followed by 4 BMWs (2 * R90/6 and 2 * R90/S).

My Yamaha came out intact with no damage to forks or subframe.

Of the 4 BMs, 3 snapped their front forks off at the base of the lower triple clamp and all 4 snapped subframes.

30 years later and I watch "wrong way round" to see snapped subframes on GS12s, and now I read here about snapped forks on GS650s.

When, oh when will the BMW factory ever learn, and when oh when, will the poor suckers who keep buying their crap ever see the light.

Garry from Oz.

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Garry from Oz - powered by Burgman

Thanks for that last information. I was already put off BMW for many other reasons but now it's final and complete. Especially when Yamaha have the base covered. I can't be the only one who is shocked and more at the thought of the front collapsing anytime, anywhere! Then the company doesn't recall them?!!! Apart from this it reminds me not to take essential parts of any bike for granted. Linzi.

First of all, glad the injury was a lot less than it could have been and best wishes for a speedy recovery.

In a past life I worked for an effectively German company with various branded European customers and dealt with some similar issues. My area at the time was brakes, so obviously the potential for huge issues when there was anything going wrong.

To answer Garry's question as best I can, BMW will get it right when their teamwork improves. The company I worked for and all the big German customers are run by engineers and have a blame culture that would have scared Julius Cesar. The engineers rule and God help any mere customers contact who suggests they might be wrong. The reaction in BMW to the fork issues will have been;

1. It's not our fault, we are great engineers it must be the user.
2. No one in Germany who we know really well brought us any busted forks.
3. We don't make the forks we buy them, let the supplier sort it out. Oh, by the way, don't change anything we designed.
4. Hmmm, an interesting bit of metalurgy/stress analysis, this will get me my doctorate. Lets keep it secret so only our company learn from it.
5. Ok, we did the campaign change, lets get back to proper engineering and design yet another weird indicator control.

The next people in the pecking order below the engineers and the accountants who want to know why you are giving away forks and scrapping stock.

The Japanese customers (and those who accept the Japanese system) worked as teams. The team member for Sales would have screamed about next years figures if the product is wrong, the purchasing guy would have taken it rather personally that he might have not given the external supplier all the right info and the engineers jump at the chance to improve the product within the whole teams major aim of staying in business. It makes life hell for the suppliers but the product is almost always right. It only goes wrong when people high up ignore their teams and usually try and keep things secret for the sake of the company image.

Even the small manufacturers do it better IMHO. It may take time to get info to the MD of say Moto Guzzi, but when you do, he'll go down on the shop floor in person and kick the **** of the guy going anything wrong.

The part number thing mentioned on ADV rider I don't consider sneaky. The lower fork leg part drawing can be changed and the complete assembly simply up indexes. This saves production and parts people hassle once the change is finished, they mod two drawings not a thousand stores and service documents.

The statement from BMW Sales "I/we never heard of this.." I'm not keen on but is probably true. Dealing with this sort of stuff isn't easy and most people don't make a career out of it. The guy who phoned and probably his boss won't have heard of it. The files on the subject will be well burried until you get to the right person in Munich. If a lawyer challenged it you'd get a simple "our employees used the information they had at the time" answer.

I never came up with a way to beat the system on this except repeated contact and threats to publicise issues. Even if every F650 owner went to the dealer on the same day to check the recall had been done, you'd only annoy the sales team not the people who run the show.

While I hate to bash BMW, in this case buying an XT could be a very good solution.

Andy

Thank you for the insight, Andy!

I think the big thing in this case is that yes they changed the design, and yes they put the new design into production for all future product, but there is no recall, not even a service campaign, for swapping the older design of fork to the later design.

To err is human and all that. To have a few organisational problems accepting that you have a fault and then dealing with it is definitely sub-optimal. But putting a design change into production specifically to resolve a safety issue and not doing anything about the installed base of product in the field gives the appearance of the very worst kind of corporate cynicism to me.

Let us hope that publicity is the answer and that BMW relents under the public spotlight and initiates a recall!

I am sure I don't need to point out to everyone that the BMW's in question here were all road models weighing about double the weight of the RD350. I also know of an R100RS (no fairing) that have traveled Africa more than once and have been across most of the globe doing more than 1 000 000Km.

Almost all BMW bikes were designed to be used on tar roads, or if you want, European road conditions. The suspensions fitted to all 1200GS's, F650's or even the F800GS has been designed to handle surfaced road conditions and even tough they can cope with a certain amount of off road use they will under perform in these conditions and if continuously used on heavy off road conditions they will fail.
I don't think BMW is denying the problem, which really have more to do with the marketing and PR department than with the engineers.
BMW like to sell their bikes using the Adventure image of the Camel man, but mostly their bikes are used for commuting and for fun rides close to home.

If you are doing hardcore off road traveling you are part of a really small group of riders not being catered for by the large OEM's as it is not financially viable to build bikes for this purpose. Most overlanders can't even afford a new R1200GS never mind a real off road tourer that might have to cost nearly double the price.

HPN is about the only factory producing hand built bikes in very small numbers for this purpose. The cost is astronomical but the bikes are superb and custom build around your needs and specifications.

Here is some of my personal experiences building my own bikes with modifications and parts from HPN.


YouTube - BMW GS by HPN; RIDE THE ADVENTURE

DIY your own bike, the HPN way.

BMW's are MADE to ride off road, or so their ad campaigns suggest. So they should be up to Pistes'. Most overheat that delicate electrical system.

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Patrick passed Dec 2018. RIP Patrick!

The RD350 is also a road bike ,so the comparison is valid .

Most ,if not all ,of the GS650 fork failures mentioned were on metalled roads .
The bike was being used for the purpose for which it was designed, so the failures are inexcusable .
BMW's attitude,once again, leaves a lot to be desired .

What has any of this got to do with HPN who produce specialised motorcycles in very small numbers?
BTW the DIY thread mentions a problem with HPN bikes at and above the speed of 130 kph ,has this been resolved ?

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Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light. - Spike Milligan
"When you come to a fork in the road ,take it ! When you come to a spoon in the road ,take that also ."

G'day GS, good to hear from you.

WRT to my RD350, I'm the sort of guy who laughs in the face of anyone who tells me I can't do something.

What, ride an RD350 (the peakiest, 2 cylinder 2 stroke sports bike of the 1970s with no bottom end power, a lightweight frame designed for the road and to win asphalt races) around the world and across the Sahara? You've got be crazy my friends said. Well that's like a red rag to a bull so I eschewed more practical bikes, said stuff you, and went out to prove it can be done.

In the same way I've just come back home after riding 7,500kms around China on a local Chinese 125cc ROAD bike, and 30,000kms from Korea to Italy via Russia/Kazakhstan (and 3,000kms of dirt) on a bloody scooter (Burgman 650), fer christ's sake.

No, the BMWs were indisputably considered by all the "experts" as THE bike to tour internationally on, and the four froggies I met in Tamanrasset laughed at me when they saw my RD (incidentally they were sponsored by one of the French bike mags). The laughing soon dissipated, however, when we compared notes in Niger (and subsequently crossed paths again in the CAR, Kenya and Zambia).

Now if we really want to get stuck into BMW let's look at the spoked alloy wheel problems they had in the 70s and are still having now. Whatever you do folks, if you ride a BMW make sure you have mag wheels if you plan to tackle any decent off road routes (or else bring along an unlimited supply of spokes).

Garry from Oz.

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