Six Gap North Georgia Mountains

After receiving my Morgan Carbtune Pro I sync'd my throttle bodies and decided to take a short ride to see if the performance would improved. Holy cow!  I really didnt expect much of a difference but I ended up seeing much smoother power delivery and gained about 10% in fuel economy.

I was so impressed with the overall performance of the bike that I decided to take a longer ride up to the North Georgia mountains.  It's about 85 miles from Sandy Springs, Ga to Blairsville, GA and the ride really gets interesting once you get north fo Dahlonega, GA.  Highway 60 north of Dahlonega is a perfect ride for early fall weather. Lots of twisties and some short open runs make it a real blast. The only downside of the ride was that there was a bicycling race the same day and so there were a lot of downhill sections where one had to be careful of runaway bicyclists  swinging a bit wide on the sharp turns.

The area is known as Six Gap, referencing a figure-8 set of roads that loop through six mountain gaps. I only rode part of the six gap but totally enjoyed it. I will come back another time and ride the entire circuit.

I stopped at a small lake by the foothills before beginning the ride up the mountains. This just gives you a sense of the natural setting in that part of Georgia.

Here's Looking at You

I rode my bike over to the dealer and picked up the new mirror.  Apparently BMW changed the design since the original exploded parts diagram in the RealOEM site. Quite simply, the new design is no longer a mirror with a simple press-fit ball and socket connection. The new mirror design is held in place with a spring wire C-clip that locks the mirror. Or perhaps the old one was missing the clip which would explain its early demise. I think this approach is better.

At any rate, the new mirror is great and it is easy to move and hold in any position I like. It also made it clear that now the left side mirror vibrates too much and therefore provides a jittery view of the cars behind me.  So I may have to replace that mirror, even though the glass is intact.

This must be BMW's strategy to keep me constantly reaching for my wallet. :-)

After replacing the mirror I went for a nice 150 mile ride through the footills of North Georgia near Dahlonega.  Perfect day for a ride and with my new mirror I could keep all the slo-pokey V-twin HD bikes in the rear view.

Mirror mirror on the floor

The K100RS was designed with a breakaway mirror mount. There is a plate with three short posts arranged in a triangle. The mirror and turn signal assembly has three matching female clips that snap onto the posts. So the idea is that if the mirror hits the ground or a wall it will break free from the fairing versus tearing a huge hole in it. The clips just pop off the post.
Ok. But it can also mean that if one of the clips gets loosened then the mirror is only supported by two clips and wind can flow under the mirror and pop the entire assembly loose.
I was riding along when this happened to me. Suddenly the mirror just cocked to the left and was hanging there by the two remaining posts. I pulled over and tried to snap it back on with only short term luck. If I hit a bump or anything the same clip would pop loose again. Rats.

I made it home and took the entire assembly off to examine it closer. As I did this the mirror glass popped out of the assembly, hit the floor and shattered. 42 bucks for a replacement.

Later I learned that you should tie off the mirror assembly with a wire or bungee cord inside the housing. That way if it comes loose you don't lose the mirror on the road. It just hangs there. Oh well.

9/11/11

Yesterday I recognized the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by doing two things to thumb my nose at those who hoped to create fear. I went to a pro football game at Soldier field and then flew back to Atlanta. The stadium was packed and so was the plane.

This pic was from the sidelines pre- game.

Updated Pic

Here's a picture of the bike as it looks today.

Neural Connections

Hoping that this was a real break in the mystery, I took the bike out for another ride. Once again, it started off great but in short order the bike cut off again and I had to pull to the side of the road. Now I'm confident that my solder connections were very good so at least I prevented a future stranding incident where the bike would not start up. But I did not fix the problem I was chasing. It wasn't the ignition switch.

Something seemed amiss in the ignition circuit. Now that I knew I had reliable power thru the ignition switch I had to keep working my way thru the firing circuit.  I had replaced the hall sensor and built a test circuit to confirm that the sensors were working. I had aligned the sensor properly when I installed it, and tested the timing with my homemade ignition testing unit. Seemed like the problem might be downstream in the Electronic Ignition Unit. And that could get expensive.

So I returned to the basics.  I had cleaned all the contacts with contact cleaner from one end of the bike to the other when I first bought the bike. I decided to check the electronic brain of the bike and work my way thru the numerous connections from there. I recalled what a pain it was to remove the large connector the first time and as I pulled on the cable it came off rather freely. Not a good sign. So I cleaned all the contacts again and as I looked at the base of the unit I also noticed that the little rubber foot mounts were not aligned in the proper slots. The rubber mounts protect the electronics from excess vibration. One of them was actually out of the track and no longer providing dampening.

I realigned the brain unit, putting the rubber feet in the track and then I very carefully aligned the cable. I made sure the cable snapped into place and that the cable locking mechanism on the right side was fully set. It was now very difficult to tug on the cable and there was no way it was going to come loose accidentally.

At this point I'm still using the process of elimination to work my way thru the entire ignition signal path. It's hard to be optimistic when I've gotten my hopes up before.  But this is another good find and a good example of the importance of checking every little detail on a new motorcycle purchase. Particularly an old K-bike. Although the bikes are legendary for their reliability, when an intermittent electrical problem pops up you need to be patient and methodical. Or start writing checks to a dealer.

Grounded

So I have installed the new Hall Effect Sensor, set the timing and think I'm golden. No such luck, you think? Correct.  After my first ride to test out the timing settings I came back home and parked the bike. Later that day I decided to go out for a quick shopping trip and as I stopped for a light it sounded like the engine was dying again. Crap! But the revs picked up again and as a precaution I pulled over to the right side of the road and made a turn off a busy road onto a back street. Good call. As I turned the corner the engine just plain quit. Instead of the slow bogging down , this time it was a quick death. Hmm....The side street was mostly a downhill so I popped the clutch and it sorta started again for a brief period, accelerated and then again it failed.  After rolling further downhill it was completely dead. I had lights etc, but it would not restart. So I dismounted, waited and eventually it came back to life. Bizarre and disappointing.

I was not far from home and managed to make it back to the house without it failing again. This intermittent failure thing is annoying, but this time I really had not ridden the bike a long way and it did not seem to be hot. So maybe I am chasing another failure mode?

Anyway, I made some more inquiries online and the next suggestion was to look at the ignition switch. I had not thought about that since the bike always seemed to start up perfectly from a cold start. I looked up the instructions for how to remove the switch and clean the contacts. While cleaning the contacts, I happened to accidentally tug one of the wires and it broke off.  (Duh-I should have inspected all of the wires first since a frayed wire could explain a lot).  Apparently, that ground wire had been frayed down to a couple strands pulling all the juice. Didnt take much to break it off, and so even if it wasnt the problem-it was going to be a problem soon.

So I resoldered the wires and cleaned up all the contacts. At this point I cant say I am confident that the situation is behind me, but I can say that at least one future headache has been avoided. While I had the gas tank off I also checked every connection and ground wire I could find. In particular I focused on the main ground wire attached to the frame and made sure it was good and tight.

I'll take it for a ride next weekend and see if this helped. Fingers crossed.