Once upon a time ...
|
Photo by LA Times (taken by Mark or Chris). |
Remember what happened on December 10th 2014? My sidecar broke down on the Racetrack Valley in Death Valley, CA (USA). Even though we rode from Las Vegas to Phoenix plenty of repair was still to be done.
We made it to the
Los Angeles Times magazine. Read the story
here (our part starts at the bottom of page 6).
My days in Mesa were fully focused on getting my sidecar back to order. Skippy was busy with her studies and making some food for us. Brant - a blacksmith running his own company - added some metal to my trailing arm. Let's hope that it will last now. At least I got his “warranty” that he will come and fix it independent of where ever I would be in case this arm will go broken again – excellent “customer” service ;)
|
Start of strengthening the stock trailing A arm. |
|
Two here... |
|
... and one here. Some paint and ready! |
|
Brant having fun. |
|
Painted and installed. |
Two days later the trailing arm was fixed, painted and installed. The rear shock repair started somewhat slow since weekend was coming and some shops are closed on Saturday whereas others are closed Sunday and Monday. As we were waiting for answers, parts were ordered and delivered it took in the end almost two weeks to get the rear shock fixed. Wow!
|
Morning walk with Brianna, Lyra and Ulpu. |
|
Brianna's heart-breaking look. |
|
Winnston - king of the house. |
|
The couch - center of the dogs lives. |
|
Gretchen, Brant, Skippy, Brianna, Winnston, Lyra and Ulpu. Brutus was hiding again somewhere. |
Another thing was to investigate the clutch of the Beemer. Something was not right. The last couple of days the bike shuddered when leaving e.g., a traffic light. Besides that the clutch had suffered a lot on this trip. Since it was obvious that the rear shock would take its time, I thought I investigate the clutch and a few hours later I had the clutch parts in my hands. Here were my findings:
The diaphragm spring was out of
center when I took it away from the bike. Now that was suspicious
and in order to avoid another failure I decided to replace it with a
new one. Most likely this was the cause for the extremely odd
behavior lately.
The clutch plate measured 5.5mm
inside, 5.3mm in the middle and 5.1mm outside. That kind of uneven
wear appears to be normal based on Siebenrock guys in Germany. As a new
plate is 6.5mm and the plate had now some 60+ tkm used, I calculated
that I would face trouble in South America assuming a linear usage.
Therefore I decided to replace it now as well.
The pressure and housing plate had
some clear markings of abuse but I decided to go with them and only
polish them a bit.
|
More broken things - Remus Revolution exhaust muffler disintegrated. |
Once more I asked for help in ADVrider
and DaveBig jumped in, sent me a stock silencer for free and even
paid for the shipping. Thanks a lot – I really appreciate it! Even
tough the BMW silencer is a bit heavier (the Remus weighs almost 4kg and
the BMW silencer weighs 6kg.), the positive effect was that
it was not as noisy as my Remus Revolution (especially since my bike
had the Y-pipe instead of the catalyst). Brant got a piece of pipe and welded the extension piece on so that it does not heat the sidecase neither makes it all black. I was happy.
|
Fits perfectly! |
What was supposed to be a 3-4 days stay
ended up to be a two weeks invasion to Brant and Gretchen's house. We
really really thank you for your patience and hospitality!
|
Track from Las Vegas to Phoenix (about 1000km). |
And some more material in the next version of our travelogue by Skippy.
Looks like you got things fixed up. Now more miles.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah - I totally agree :D
Delete