Really?! For a battery?
It was a beautiful morning this week: clouds for shade, warm, not too humid. Perfect day to go motorcycle riding with the local retirees. I am fortunate to have met (and allowed to ride with) a group of older, retired Richmonders on their regular Tuesday rides through rural Virginia and sometimes West Virginia and North Carolina, 200 to 300 miles with a nice lunch break.
Protective clothing: leather chaps, boots, helmet, gloves, armored jacket … check.
Accessories: wallet, sunscreen, water bottle, snacks, garage opener, house key … check.
Chores: reset the odometer, check tire pressures, check all zippers so nothing falls out, plug in Garmin … check.
Ready to go! Turn the key. Nada, zip, instant mood deflation.
Batteries can last five years on a motorcycle, maybe more if you keep them on a trickle charger such as the Battery Tender (which I do). This 2001 BMW is one year old to me so I don’t know the battery age. Was going to die sometime.
Unknown to me, there had been a clue. On the BMW, there are two flashing ABS lights when you start the bike. They go out when you start riding. After returning from Europe, on the first ride, I noted the lights kept flashing. The next rides no problem. I later learned on an Internet forum that this was not necessarily a sign that the expensive ABS system needed replacing but that the battery was bad.
Well, if it had to happen, it was a perfect time. I was at home, the ride was completely optional, it didn’t happen at lunch a hundred miles away, or in cold or rainy weather, and it was before my trip next week to the BMW Rider’s Association Annual Rally in Woodstock, Virginia.
See even this Eor can look on the bright side!
When the battery died on my Honda motorcycle, I simply took the seat off, removed the battery, went to AutoZone, bought a new one, reinstalled and good to go. An easy home repair using one wrench and under $100.
My options for this BMW were: replace the battery myself, rent a U-Haul trailer and take it to Morton’s BMW in Fredericksburg, get angry and pout, give it away on eBay.
Hey, I have replaced car batteries, lawn tractor batteries, and the Honda VFR battery. How hard can it be!
BMW hard it turns out.
So much for quality German engineering. Otto was having a bad day when he designed this bike. Let the story continue in the captions below.
My addition to Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary” is “an odd lump of Tupperware crafted to make a motorcycle look nice by covering the mechanicals while making those same mechanicals completely inaccessible to the mechanic.”
Next day I put it all back together: reattached the cables to the electrodes in tight quarters, shoehorned the awkward fairing back on, started with the first of 14 bolts, remembered that I forgot to first reattach the air duct, removed the fairing, struggled for 30 minutes to reattach the air duct (tight fit), rethingamajiggied the fairing, screwed the 14 bolts in their right places, put seat and bags on, and reset the clock. Not counting the battery trip to Morton’s, about four hours of labor doing something a good mechanic could do in 30 minutes.
Well, it is working again and I did learn a lot about this motorcycle, that is, I don’t like all the fairings and prefer a lighter “naked” motorcycle with accessible innards. Maybe I will sell it on eBay after all!