Annual Maintenance

The GT is presently offline while I complete an annual maintenance ritual. I find my RT to be the best bike for winter riding due to the superior wind protection.  There's really no "off season" in Atlanta, unless we get a rare winter snowstorm which usually clears up in a few days, maybe a week at most. So when it is time to change fluids and filters on the GT I just ride the RT more.

As much as I love the aerodynamic styling of the BMW bikes, it can be a pain in the butt to complete some routine tasks that require the removal of the so called "tupperware".  That refers to the plastic body panels that wrap both the GT and RT. Beautiful to look at but it seems like 40 or more screws to remove and it's easy to miss one or two that may be hidden behind a mirror or under a belly pan.

The first task I tackled was a potentially serious problem. The GT has fuel disconnects that were a known to be sub-par from the factory. When I bought the bike, the mileage was pretty low and everything worked fine so I figured I would just replace the disconnects at the next service interval. Bad call. I should have just jumped in and replaced them day one. I was returning from a long ride and I stopped for gas and after filling up I smelled gas fumes. My first thought was that I overfilled the tank or got careless with the nozzle. When I got home and put the bike in the garage I noticed that my leather pants smelled of gasoline as well. Hmm...did I leak that much gasoline that it spilled on my pants?  I wasn't thinking of the possibility of the fuel disconnects leaking.

The next morning when I started up the bike I noticed a fog of white smoke on the right side. Holy crap! It wasn't smoke it was finely vaporized gas from the fuel disconnects. I shut the bike off and thanked my lucky stars that I was not a smoker or parked near any open flames. It's possible that I had been riding that way ever since my last fill-up. Cruising along at 70 mph trailing a fine mist of gas vapors.

Replacing the fuel disconnects requires removal of all the body panels. Some guy posted that he was able to replace the disconnects through the opening on the side of the engine. Very hard to believe. There isn't enough slack and even someone with superhuman hand strength would have a hard time removing the old disconnects and properly attaching the new ones. It's not easy and would be a total knucklebuster to try via his claimed method.

I picked up the replacements at Beemer Boneyard. The entire kit was not that expensive and everything works great now. Since I already had the skins off, I decided to do some other needed work.  I'll walk through that in a future post. Oil and gas filters, drive lubrication and ABS system bleed will be next.