I must admit that I am somewhat with Patrick (fill out your profile, lozza!!!)
I have some experience with a variety of motorcycles under conditions a bit rougher than the usual "commute to work and weekend trips" story.

Bottom line: I really do not understand the reputation of BMW motorcycles as being oh so reliable. Whilst they seemed to have been ahead with reliability some fourty or fifty years ago and some of the famed R75 Wehrmachtsgespann of WWII vintage are said to have travelled overland all the way from Berlin to Stalingrad and back reality has changed quite a bit:

Lucky if you own a R1100 /1150 / 1200 as you deal with BMW's quote: "Crown Jewel" :unquote and BMW seems to spend considerable effort on getting these bikes going and on keeping them going. The 1100 GS at Le Cap is doing remarkably well. Some minor oil leaks, a buggered clutch, a gearbox that shifts with the ease of it's russian army tank pendant, all fine after 100000km. Who needs a fuel gauge showing you w.t.f. as long as the little yellow reserve light works. Once you had the tank off you will also have sealing fuel line couplers installed which only cost a few bucks. Amazing that nobody at BMW seems to care or know about this.
Maybe worse that the brake discs wear into the mounting on the front hub. But BMW assures me that it's no problem - besides the nerve whacking rattle at every bump.

Much worse than the Crown Jewel: The unloved child F 650. After the first series of Funduros were bungled together at some Italian Spaghetti factory and everybody asked themselves if a BMW castrated otherwise fine Rotax 650 ConCam engine qualifies the product to bear the make's logo things could only become better with the change to the GS / GS Dakar and the move of the assembly line to Berlin. How wrong we were! The steering head bearings are as shitty as ever, same for rear shocks and the thing still weights as much as a truckload of bricks.

At the same time Japanese bikes have become boringly reliable. Two of my DR 650's have done more than 100000km and are still going strong. No major problems so far. A full service with valve job takes two hours and a R80 tappet socket is the only special tool you need to service the bike (and you can substitute a pair of nose pliers in an emergency).

But all this will not stop a BMW fanatic to dream on about the world's best bike...

Maybe the BMW fanatic will start dreaming about a low and easy maintenance japcrap bike after synchronizing the R1100GS's throttle bodies? I did it yesterday.
What a mission!
Not that the old Bing's were easier. But at least more accessible. The guys in Munich and Berlin don't seem to learn.
Can you swop the right and the left throttle body over :-) This would make the job sooooo easy!

Thanks for your help but I did buy the bike last week , after trying the 3 bikes with my wife , the more confortable for her was the 1200GS , I know that is not your first choice but I love to travel with her and confort was my first priority, the peg on the DL are to high for the passenger and the vibration are pretty bad at 80 M/H, the 1150 was the most confortable but a bit too heavy for me, I just did 1000 miles in the weekend and that is a great fun bike to ride, regarding maintenance and reliablity ,I have the waranty and a descent credit card.
I normally travel arround the world alone on my KLR650 or my XR650R but this new toy is only a addition to my garage for trip 2 up. I regret that the new bikes are sometime so high tech, doing mecanic on them is getting really hard just as my cars.
Thanks again for the opinion ( the ones which constructive)(esp Molly)
(I may buy a DL and prep it t replace the KLR for ride one up.

What a loads of bollocks!!! :P

Been away from a forum a while and now reading all this makes a big ironic grin into my face

"What a mission!?" You ought to go consult with some mechanic then, to learn how to perform a TB sync correctly? I do my 1100s TB sync less than 5 minutes (try that on any other plastic covered multi cylinders), we can do even a friendly comparision competition who does TB sync faster on a stock bike

Valve clearance check and adjust - I normally do it within 15 minutes, never seen any other bike where it's easier and more intuitive to perform on.

Full service I can do less than an hour if I'm somehow in a hurry. Normally I do it around an hour to 1,5 hours with a in my other hand. On my overengineered fragile jap bike I did it half a day compared to this and understood how much easier it is on a robust "german tank". Suzuki was like a fragile chinese plastic toy where they've been trying to cut down the costs on every corner designing/constructing it, whereas BMWs I own are built to last - more robust construction, thicker and better supported plastic, thicker paint and bits are much better thought through when working on the bike, considerably better accessibility to perform routine tasks, electrics and cabling better supported against the vibrations.

Reliability: together around 100 000kms with my later 1998 R1100GSes have ridden, mostly gravel roads and bumpy tar you only can experience in the ex-USSR countries nowhere else in the World and been bullet proof reliable. Not a single permanent fault per this mileage, only thing that's temporarely failed was the rear brake master cylinder overheating, when the bike was a full day in the sunlight with over +40C weather in Iran, then the rear brake was gone for some time until it cooled down. Also it's done over 17,000+kms of a travel without any maintenance at all on the bike, around half of it in the +45C weather (it's an air-oil cooled bike) in Iran with bad quality very low octane leaded fuel with valves making bad noise under load, that's two up and the bike's being loaded to it's max permitted weight and even over it, rear stock Showa shock kicked into maximum in a bad way often on the potholed smaller roads in Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Iran, but nothing gave up on the bike, didn't miss a single beat. I'd easily rate it's reliability to the maximum possible level after experiencing my own what the bike has been through, and I couldn't ask more from it.
Would you try to do the same abuse with a bike where the clutch and gearbox floats in the same engine oil?

I cannot say the same good words for many jap bikes around here, including my Suzuki GSX 600 that's been one of the most unreliable bikes I've ever had with a "massive" 50Kkms I rode it on the bad roads around here until I sold it, paying too much for it's much more expensive service and repair bits. Most of the faults and failures came from electrical side where the japs supposed to be much better and more jap way "hi-tec", but they simply aren't it proved.

I do all the maintenance and work on the bike my own, always.

We all know that every bike will have it's faults sooner or later, I don't consider myself to be very loyal to any make (hell no, I bash BMW service often) but so far my BMWs certanly have proven to me to be one of the most cost effective and reliable bikes to run in the bad conditions we have around here. I simply do not agree with the uncompetent statments above in this thread.

Hendi has made his choice and I think a good one, for 2-up travel the big GS is naturally very well suited.

Happy travels!

Dear Margus,

before your pink BMW glasses fall off your nose from excitement:

My main critics were directed at the F650.
IMHO the F650 (any model) is a pathetic bike. That's my oppinion based on 6 Funduros and two GS / Dakar.

I said lucky you if you have a R-GS as BMW at least bothers to sort out some of the weak points.
I don't think you find a lot of bikes where you have to synchronise anything after replacing throttle cables.

If running engine, clutch and gearbox in one and the same oil would not work then nobody would do it. Even BMW does it on the F 650.
A separate gearbox and a dry clutch is not a quality feature.

And now you can keep on praising your Nazi tank.

We keep on riding our agile and lightweight reliable and low maintenance Jap crap.

If the F650's are so bad, then I wonder why it took you 6 funduros and 2 GS'es to find out. I guess you wanted to be very very sure they were realy so bad :-)

My experience with the F650GS is very good. I did ride it from home in Holland to the NorthCape and back (+ 8000 km) and only had to oil the chain every morning and add 1/4 liter oil only once.

__________________
Jan Krijtenburg

My bikes are a Honda GoldWing GL1200 and a Harley-Davidson FXD Dyna Super Glide

My personal homepage with trip reports: https://www.krijtenburg.nl/
YouTube channel (that I do together with one of my sons): motormobilist.nl

Hi Patrick,
You wrote;
> If you had followed Lecap's posts for a few years like I have you would know
> why he had so many BMW's. Actually, he had these bikes and a bunch more...
> you see he runs a Travel Tour Rental outfit in South Africa.
That explains a lot. I was wondering why anyone would buy bike after bike that he didn't like but if you buy them all at once, that is different. (and to bad it you are dissapointed in all those bikes)

> Ride On!! (bring parts)
I will, but without a lot of parts.
My BMW is "innocent untill proven guilty" and until now it is very innocent in reliability :-)

Any bike has some + and some - but in the end, you don't buy a bike on specs only but also very much because you like that bike (unless you use the bikes to make a living like Lecap does.) and I like my BMW very much.

__________________
Jan Krijtenburg

My bikes are a Honda GoldWing GL1200 and a Harley-Davidson FXD Dyna Super Glide

My personal homepage with trip reports: https://www.krijtenburg.nl/
YouTube channel (that I do together with one of my sons): motormobilist.nl

I started this posted because I had a need for a bike to ride two up , my choice were the 1200GS,the 1150,the DL1000, I tried all of them and did like all of them but my wife love the confort of the 1200GS 2005, I don't understand why everybody is trying to fight to prove that their bike is the best, I owned many bikes from the old 80GS ,ducati 900ss, guzzi and many more.I crossed the sahara on my old GS, tarvel accross SE Asia on a XR250R, did all europe on my FJR1300ABS and travel from Miami to Terra del fuego on a XL250 without any problem ,lets stop to fight over which bike is the best because to me they all are great , and if you are ready to pay the price and accept thier default your are alway driving the right bike. Our strengh is that we are traveller and that we choose the motorcycle as our transportation ,lets not get vain and self center about whos got the best one.

Hendi

Thanks for setting that straight, Patrick.

Hi Lecap,

Do you have a website of your company ? I have family in South Africa and sometimes when I go there I borrow my uncle's Harley LowRider and sometimes I rent a bike.

I'm also thinking about buying a cheap bike (BMW R45/65) and leaving it at my uncle's house. I'm not sure what to do so I'm gathering information about the possibilities now.

__________________
Jan Krijtenburg

My bikes are a Honda GoldWing GL1200 and a Harley-Davidson FXD Dyna Super Glide

My personal homepage with trip reports: https://www.krijtenburg.nl/
YouTube channel (that I do together with one of my sons): motormobilist.nl

Well said, Pete. That's a nasty and ignorant comment, Lecap. Why don't you spend a few years on Robbins Island ....and quieten down for a while?

This is just too stupid....

Like som other bikes you have should synchronise after replacing throttle cables, mine lasts 50.000km -70.000 km...
How many times have you changed the clutch on a jap Bike after 70.000km? The Beemer has still 70.000 km left...

Guess what kind of bike....


Easiest way of synch is to meassure the the distance of the open cable with a ruler, it will always run pretty good after this.
The propper way is to use a 6 mm tube and fill it with water/petrol/oil and adjust it propperly.
Anyway, 15 minutes max.


It's usually the driver who is the limit, not the bike:
YouTube - BMW Motorcycles HP2 at Erzberg MC Rodeo 2006!

... but Sala use to ride pretty good:
YouTube - BMW Motorcycles HP2 at the GCC Goldbach!

People that have used the Hubb for a while know that Margus has been around with his GS:-)

You can get help from any tech or car shop anywhere in the world on most cases, there isn't much need for a speciefic dealer these days. DHL, Fedex etc works max few days package delivery all around the World to get your parts ordered from the "civilized world".

All this moan about reliability, brakedowns, where to get help, dealers, etc etc sounds like people are going just a way too paranoid these days. No wonder why we still have wars going on the Earth.

So if your Suzuki's blows up and engine completely mechanically seizes in the middle of nowhere, so what? You'll die soon after on the spot because of that?

This can happend on any bike. Doesn't matter if there's written BMW on it, or Honda or a HD, doesn't matter if the bike costs 500$ or it costed 500,000$ for you, nothing is mechanically perfect.

I tend to think people miss the sense of adventure these days and massivly trying to model illusory stability and social well-being they experience in their everyday lives (a stable "home-work-home" route) onto adventure travel and assuming the same philosophy should apply there as well, with no surprises coming up, a static system, assuming that all goes as expected and is 100% safe. Then better get a tourist spa package to Hawaii!

I.e. compare the travel stories done in the 70-80s on BMWs or Enfields or even HDs into third-world, lot of technical problems, no dealers around, but that's what makes it interesting. Compare them with dozens of modern date travel stories where not much happends.

Remember the good old sayings:

"Adventure starts where things start to go not as planned."

"Travel is galmorous only in retrospect."

What do you want to remember in your old age if you've done only short travels where the bike worked 100%, just another boring travel story to remember, or is it ultra-interesting somehow for you to read the same stuff all over again?

As Grant sayed: it's somehow really good if you brake down in the middle of nowhere, you get to know locals while you order your parts and work on the bike. A chance for a real contact with the locals that you don't experience much on "regular" travels. There's a thing to remember and write in your travel book! Think positive!

What I'm simply tring to say here is that there's no definitive truth about machine's reliability versus travel. I think most of current date bikes are realiable enough to get you anywhere in the World or multiple circles around it if your really want it, possible even on a 50cc scooter. And from this point of view, on chooshing the bike it's better to focus on the character of the bike rather than abusing your brain with the dogmatic information of 'realiability' going around in the internet that only makes people more paranoid. So the question is: do your really LOVE to ride THIS bike?

Yes?! Then pack up and go! Enjoy!

I'd stop moaning, japs will soon have a similar system and then you start to think it's "normal". Time goes on and listening only Mozart doesn't bring on the evolution much. BMW has made the first step forward, they have guts to do it as we know and they can suffer the "teenager" consequences as well being the only real tester of the new system.

Japs will proabably just copycat it later when it works convincingly.

I think diagnostics equipment you can carry on the road is pretty effective on the current date, and will be much more in the future. If they catch up, a small compact diagnostics computer that fits into your pocket, you can take on the road, then the hassle with the electrical issues like on the current regular wired bikes will belong into history.

So I think the direction the BMW is going is positive and I'm pretty sure it's the future of bike's electrics, others will follow sooner or later.

What's the point of ultra-smooth shifting when it shifts smooth enough?

What I really like about the boxer twin engine is the pulling power starting from VERY low rpms, @2K there's already decent pull for a fully loaded bike - thus I need to shift very little, most of the city I can ride through in 3rd gear.

If it was a racing-sportsbike with some 15Krpm redline with gears having very small differences and whole day you need to kick up and down gears in a fraction of a second then yes, ultra-fast shifting would be required. But it's definately not my cup of tea for riding long rides, I prefer lazily low revving "torquey" engines with few gear changes, especially on travelling I find it to be a very good pro for a long distance bike.

With my bottom end, I haven't yet experienced any similar displacement bikes that pull so well start from the idle as R1xx0 boxers do.

And this is the character I really like on the bike on travelling and every day communiting, makes a grin in my face.

Most rivals toast the R1xx0 engine from high revs like a toy but again it's not my cup of tea and I'm thankful BMW has optimized their engine for the real life conditions not following the peak horsepower specs run to be in the competition with others for the 'biking n00b market' that only look on the paper on deciding which bike to buy - I rarely go near to the redline on travelling and the sweetest part is the mid-revs that I use the most every day and where I really like the character of a boxer engine. The redline is already @7.5K, for a 1080cc twin it's quite a respectable spec, I personally much prefer it over the screaming bikes that most of similar capacity v-twins and inline multis are nowadays (i.e. only 80cc smaller V-Strom's redline is much higher @9.5K). Different strokes for different folks.

While everyone seem to run towards to the peak performance spec (which means more revs) I'd like to go to the opposite direction. Couln't imagine travelling with a 18,000+rpm revving F1 engine on a big trailie bike... Pointless.

I've always fancied about lightweight (for a) diesel big trailie too, with some 4K redline and loads of torque right up from the idle, shaft drived of course. Would make a fantastic bike for my needs.

There is some truth in it in some way. All bmw oilheads R850/1100/1150/1200 have VERY stiff oil rings, it takes at least 30,000kms to run them in, the practice has shown. Newer bikes haven't reached this mileage and they do take relatively lot of oil especially when the bikes are very new. From first 1000kms I think there goes even 0.5 to 1 litre of it, that's what i've heard. Oil consumption stops around after 30,000kms, I've experienced it on my both R1100GSes. On my 17,200km expedition to Iran and back (w/o no maintenance at all on the bike) it took exacly 1.5 litres of oil, which does 88 millilitres per 1000 kms and I consider this to be a trusty spec for an air-oil cooled engine going through Iran and Turkey's summer weather in the heat boom (+35 to +45C sauna). I wouldn't trust the bike that consumes no oil at all per very long mileage, I'd doubt this kind of bike works in a long term. Think how big the mechanical movement is in the engine and how much lubrication there is needed. As a side note: my Suzuki I4 took about the same amount of oil using only quality full synth oils made for wet clutched motorcycles.

Note that on GS I use the cheap semi-synth oils I can find from car shops. Using quality oils reduces the consumption considerably on boxers.

Stiff oil rings come as pro later on. There's lot of oilheads with 300K+ mileages with NO top end overhaul done and the oil consumption and the compression are within specs. So the top end's resource of the engine is excellent for a big capacaty twin. I also know an older airhead with over 300,000+km on the clock and uses no oil if using high quality Castrol synthetic, thus the consumption also depends lot of the quality of oil.

As Ali Baba put the picture with 450,000+km done R1100GS, there are many of them very high mileage capable.

One of the reasons for additional oil consumption is the boxer concept itself actually - using side stand regulary can increase the oil consuption. Reason is there that using side stand puts one cylinder head above the horizontal axis, and if the engine stopped in the crank position leaving "bottom" cylinder's exhaust valve open means that a small gulp of oil left from the last stroke will flow into exhaust. It's considerably reduced on the new oilheads tho (if you remember the smoking airheads in the morning after they've been left on the sidestand for a night ), but it's still there, it's a "feature". That's why you see many boxer bikers use centre stand mostly rather than side stand for a night stay.

Hope this explains it.



OK, some offtopic for the relief then. Baltics: it's cheaper (fuel, food, accom, ...) than most of western Europe. Also for the big trailies it's an ideal playground - lot of gravel roads you don't see everywhere in the western Europe, and also the main tar roads are very shaky.

Currently it's like this here, winter:


But we have also warm summers, riding season is around 7-8 months.

Lot of gravel with some nice straights to test your bike's stability and top speed on the loose surface


And if you look for enough then you can find a footpeg scratching tar too:

(warning: don't try this at home, like I did with 1 hand only!)

But certanly many roads aren't that overcivilized, which is good for your riding skills:






Shaft drive comes in really handy often:




Islands have nice beaches and lot of offroad opportunities:













Almost forgot to mention that we have nice girls too who just love big trailies



All right, I've been vain enough with my pics. All yours now.

Cheers, Margus

Nice pictures Margus, I guess I have to add the Baltics to my list of places I want to visit.

__________________
Jan Krijtenburg

My bikes are a Honda GoldWing GL1200 and a Harley-Davidson FXD Dyna Super Glide

My personal homepage with trip reports: https://www.krijtenburg.nl/
YouTube channel (that I do together with one of my sons): motormobilist.nl

Teh gadgets have been available for a while... GS-911 Diagnostic Tool
There are others to:-)