Ancient Beemer Update

Ancient Beemer update

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

IT’S ALWAYS A GOOD SIGN WHEN YOU take your eyes off the road for a moment, look down at your own bike and say aloud to yourself, “This is a great motorcycle.” Especially if you do it three or four times during a 500-mile ride, on a bike you have owned for the better part of a decade.

I found myself muttering that very mantra again just last month while on a trip to Alma.

“Alma, Wisconsin?” you say. “Little river town, population 831, just north of La Crosse on the banks of the Mississippi?”

Yes, the very place.

As a prelude to this year’s spring Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang Café Racer Run, our entire group decided to * take a Friday and Saturday backroad trip, riding northwest through the green hill country and descending on the unsuspecting village of Alma, where we would take over the entire Alma Hotel, a nice old place right on Main Street, overlooking the scenic but floodswollen Big Muddy.

We didn’t all ride together, because if there is one thing Slimey Cruds cannot agree upon it’s what time to get up in the morning. We have a big Detroit contingent, and these guys subscribe to the “party ’til you forget where you were planning to sleep” school of celebration. They tend to rise regretfully, toward the end of morning.

So we left for Alma in small groups of three to six riders, and all filtered into town around early evening, just in time for one of Wisconsin’s famous Friday night fish fries and the sacramental brandy Manhattan or two at the usual smoky hotel bar, where cheerfully overweight folks still puff on cigarettes like characters in a Fritz Lang movie.

The 20 or so bikes parked in front of the hotel made an interesting study this year, a mix of old and new. The hottest “new” bike in the group was the Cagiva Gran Canyon, of which there were two, much praised by their recent purchasers. We also had the random Triumph, Bimota and Ducati in the mix, but by far the majority were BMWs. Old and new.

If there is a common ownership pattern within our varied membership, it is probably this: Most of the guys started out on Nortons and Triumphs-or early Sportsters-and now own some kind of modern Ducati (or Cagiva or Bimota, 900cc two-valve Twins predominate) for sport rides, an old British Twin or Harley for tradition and a BMW for travel.

There has been some dabbling in newer Harleys in the long-distance travel sector, but this has often been followed by a reversion to BMWs, for their wider performance spectrum.

So when we walked out of the bar that evening to get a little fresh air, someone said, “Looks like a damned BMW club.”

Indeed it did. And way down on the end of the row, parked next to two other RIOORSs (we have no fewer than seven of them in the group), was my own 1984 silversmoke R100RS.

Yes, the very object of my favorable comments while riding along earlier in the day. I had planned initially to ride my Ducati 900SS, but when the weatherman forecast cool rainy weather, the tankbag immediately got switched to the Beemer. It’s the consummate bad-weather bike.

This old BMW is a bike I bought back in 1990, when Barb and I first moved back to Wisconsin from California. I found it sitting on the floor of a BMW shop with the dauntingly high mileage of 75,000 appearing on the odometer. I bought it anyway, and almost immediately added a new clutch, master cylinder and tires to the cost. It ran beautifully for several years, and Barb and I took it on an extended summer trip through British Columbia. After that, it got a valve job and a fork rebuild.

The RS was my long-distance travel bike for about six years, and then I sold it. It traded hands a few times among close friends, and last summer I bought it back. Just in time to take it on a 6000mile trip to Idaho, down the West Coast and home. I’ve been using it as my “main bike” ever since.

So now it seems I’ve begun a new decade with the same sport-tourer that kicked off the last one. The only difference is, the old Beemer now has a few more miles on it. On our trip to Alma, it rolled over 98,000. I suppose sometime this summer I’ll have to throw a 100,000-mile .party for the old Beemer, if I don’t throw a rod or something else in the meantime. The cases have never been apart.

So why, you might ask, have I come back to this venerable object? By modern standards (or even 1984 standards), it’s fast but not scintillatingly quick; the triple-disc brakes haul it down well enough, but lack sensitivity. And there’s a lot of wind noise-you have to wear earplugs. Also, the bike is a little clumsy for short trips around town.

On the plus side, the old RS has a superbly comfortable stock two-up seat, the best weather protection anyone ever designed into a sport-touring fairing, an ideal all-day riding position, light weight, nicely crafted pieces, a large gas tank and good fuel mileage, a clock that keeps time (and runs the battery down), useable torque exactly where you need it, the ability to generate an indicated 130 mph, two-up, valves that can be adjusted while you sit on a curb in Jackson, Wyoming, durable luggage that’s easy to take on and off, heated grips, a criminally relaxed 80100-mph cruise capability, spot-on carburetion and throttle response (i.e. no fuel-injection surge), timeless good looks of the Teutonic school, shaft drive, excellent handling (with progressive springs added to the fork), civilized suppleness of ride, a nice big-Twin gait on the highway and the strange ability to make you say, three or four times during a 500-mile ride, “This is a great motorcycle.”

The only real problem with the RS is it’s old. If someone would make a new bike with all these virtues-and a few others—I’d buy one in a minute. But, so far, no one has.

So in the meantime, I guess I’ll stick with the ancient Beemer. And if it blows up before reaching 100,000, I’ll probably just look for another one.

Or stockpile a spare, for the duration. Maybe one of those stunningly modern white-and-blue single-shock versions from the Reagan years.