Leanings

LEANINGS

The long miles

Peter Egan

LESSER HOLLYWOOD DIRECTORS AND cartoonists would have you believe that we humans (not to mention talking, bipedal cats and mice) do a double take when presented with something, or someone, stunningly attractive—that we glance at the object of desire, look away, mentally process the information and then fling our heads back for another look, like someone using his eyeballs to cast for trout.

It seems to me that in real life we go around more or less spring-loaded to be seduced by certain colors and shapes, and when they finally appear, we do a single take, just one penetrating stare that is more akin to radar lock-in than flabbergasted surprise. So it was with the Beemer. I spotted the bike before we were halfway through the door of the dealership and the old eyeballs connected immediately. One long, single take.

It was a 1984 BMW^RIOORS. Twin shocks, rounded tailpiece, wide, comfortable-looking seat, short bars and tidy, aerodynamic fairing, painted in Silver Smoke. A shimmering color with black accents gathering like rain clouds at the edges of the fairing and fuel tank, imparting the mood of a storm in the Alps, or some other Wagnerian cataclysm. Strangely amorphous and organic, yet wind-tunnel clean and Germanically purposeful.

Just before we left California and moved to Wisconsin last spring, I’d sold my black BMW R80. A perfectly nice bike, but I found myself longing for the extra thud of a lOOOcc Beemer, not to mention the superb RS fairing to extend the Midwestern riding season one or two months on either side of winter. So I sold the R80, hoping to find an R100RS.

And here it was. The exact model and color I’d been looking for, standing on the showroom floor of a shop in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. A oneowner bike, the dealer told me, bought new in 1984 at this very shop, traded in on a new K100. Fresh battery, fair tires, no known mechanical problems. Even the price seemed okay. Gee, I thought. Almost too good to be true. Home at last. How can I go wrong? Then I looked at the odometer. It

read 75,000 miles.

Now, I suppose to a typical BMW touring rider or a Gold Wing owner, this mileage sounds moderate, but to a person of my motorcycling habits, a bike with 75,000 miles on the odometer sounds like it’s been to Uranus and back about nine times.

Not that I haven't ridden a bit. I’ve crossed the U.S. a few times and done more than my share of 1000-mile weekends. But most of my trips are 100-200-mile rides or 6-mile dashes to the hardware store. Spread across a fluctuating two-to-six-bike collection, the miles don't pile up very fast.

I think the highest number of actual miles I’ve ever put on a single motorcycle is about 15,000.

But here was an owner who. in six years, had put 75,000 miles on just one bike. That represented four or five total rebuilds on some of the British iron I’d owned, yet the BMW looked barely used and the dealer assured me the heads had never beén off. “Just been in for normal maintenance,” he said.

How did the guy do it? Dashing off every month to rallies in Montana and Colorado? A girlfriend in Alaska? I pictured a driven man with bloodshot eyes, riding day and night, sliding into truckstops and shouting, “Waitress, more coffee! I’ve got to ridel”

Maybe he just had one bike, I reasoned. Some people do.

Fine, but was this one bike (which I wanted to buy) any damned good or was it all worn out? I took it for a ride and everything worked just fine. Still,

I had doubts about its long-term future, so I called my friend Brian Bell, a BMW dealer in Santa Ana, Calfornia.

“If it’s been maintained, it should be perfectly okay.” he told me. “We just did rings on an '84 R100RS with 180,000 miles on the odometer and it didn’t even need new pistons. Also, the cylinder bores were perfect. You might check the splines at the rear wheel. Sometimes those can wear, but it’s an easy fix.”

My friend Butch Chase, who has about 17 trillion miles on his old R90/6 said, “I wouldn't give 75,000 miles a second thought on a BMW liter-bike. They just go forever.”

My friend Jeff Dean, BMW enthusiast and collector extraordinaire said, “Your’re crazy to buy that thing. Why not pay a few hundred dollars more and find one that’s almost new? Look around a while, you’ll find a good low-mileage bike. Be patient.”

But I was all done being patient. I had to have that Silver Smoke R100RS. I was actually intrigued by this high-mileage special. It was almost worth buying the thing just to satisfy my mechancial curiosity, to see what sort of havoc, if any, 75,000 miles plays on a big Boxer.

So, needless to say, I bought the bike.

On the way home from the dealership, I went 1 10 miles per hour and the clutch started to slip. Then it cured itself and hasn’t slipped since— possibly it was some oil seeping in from an overfilled transmission. The bike also needs new tires and has one worn throttle cable. Other than that, I can’t find anything wrong with it.

Last week, Barb and I loaded up the saddlebags and we did a meandering three-day trip, stopping to visit friends in Stillwater, Minnesota. Sometimes we merely cruised and other times we cruised at 100 miles per hour. Mostly we just whispered majestically along in great smooth loping strides as big Beemers like to do. At the end of the 850-mile trip, we’d averaged 44 miles per gallon on the huge 6.3-gallon tank and burned nearly one-fourth of a quart of oil.

Experiments from the wild edge of the mileage frontier continue. I’ll report back from time to time, if there’s anything to report. E3