Picked up another ride... - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

KarTek · #1 03-07-2013, 09:41 PM

Title in honor of Justin!

So, I've been looking for a modern bike off and on, for about 10 years now and I finally found one I really like.

I picked up a 2009 BMW F650GS. It has everything I could ever want in a bike!

I'm looking forward to years of fun rides and I'm about as excited about this as anything in the last few years.

catmandoo62 · #2 03-07-2013, 10:02 PM

from one beemer owner to another.nice ride.i have always kinda in the back of my mind wanted a GS but in the boxer range of say 1100 or so.just cuz they look so damn cool and will go pretty much anywhere.happy trails!!

DieselPaul · #3 03-07-2013, 10:10 PM

Great looking bike. Love BMWs.

Jim B. · #4 03-08-2013, 08:56 AM

From "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (An Inquiry Into Values)"

Robert Pirsig (1976)

This old engine has a nickels-and-dimes sound to it. As if there were a lot of loose change flying around inside. Sounds awful, but it’s just normal valve clatter. Once you get used to that sound and learn to expect it, you automatically hear any difference. If you don’t hear any, that’s good.

I tried to get John interested in that sound once but it was hopeless. All he heard was noise and all he saw was the machine and me with greasy tools in my hands, nothing else. That didn’t work.

He didn’t really see what was going on and was not interested enough to find out. He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are. That’s quite important, that he sees things this way. It took me a long time to see this difference and it’s important for the Chautauqua that I make this difference clear.

I was so baffled by his refusal even to think about any mechanical subject I kept searching for ways to clue him to the whole thing but didn’t know where to start.

I thought I would wait until something went wrong with his machine and then I would help him fix it and that way get him into it, but I goofed that one myself because I didn’t understand this difference in the way he looked at things.

His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.

When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.

"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.

"What’s shim?"

"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."

"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"

"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.

He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"

"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."

I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.

But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

Ach, du lieber!

Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.

You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.

I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.

In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.

For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.

That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is,in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?

I guess I forgot to mention John is a musician, a drummer, who works with groups all over town and makes a pretty fair income from it. I suppose he just thinks about everything the way he thinks about drumming...which is to say he doesn’t really think about it at all. He just does it. Is with it. He just responded to fixing his motorcycle with a beer can the way he would respond to someone dragging the beat while he was playing. It just did a big thud with him and that was it. He didn’t want any part of it.

At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew—and grew—and grew—until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.

He really does care about technology. It’s just that in this other dimension he gets all screwed up and is rebuffed by it. It just won’t swing for him. He tries to swing it without any rational premeditation and botches it and botches it and botches it and after so many botches gives up and just kind of puts a blanket curse on that whole nuts-and-bolts scene. He will not or cannot believe there is anything in this world for which grooving is not the way to go.

That’s the dimension he’s in. The groovy dimension. I’m being awfully square talking about all this mechanical stuff all the time. It’s all just parts and relationships and analyses and syntheses and figuring things out and it isn’t really here. It’s somewhere else, which thinks it’s here, but’s a million miles away. This is what it’s all about. He’s on this dimensional difference which underlay much of the cultural changes of the sixties, I think, and is still in the process of reshaping our whole national outlook on things. The "generation gap" has been a result of it. The names "beat" and "hip" grew out of it. Now it’s become apparent that this dimension isn’t a fad that’s going to go away next year or the year after. It’s here to stay because it’s a very serious and important way of looking at things that looks incompatible with reason and order and responsibility but actually is not. Now we are down to the root of things.

More:

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, robert m. pirsig

Angel · #5 03-08-2013, 11:20 AM

I loved ZMM - interesting story and viewpoints.

I also love articulated helmets - good choice (do you have glasses too ?)
Nothing makes a rider seem more like a real human being than being able to see their face (assuming that their bike hasnt turned you off in the first place)

Now you are a member of the "chain gang ?"

(I'm trying to be an Airhead, but the R65 isnt totally legal yet)

-John

KarTek · #6 03-08-2013, 02:40 PM

I love the philosophy of the Z&MM. It was actually required reading for one of my college classes!

I went out today and did some of the paperwork and priced out some of the safety gear I'll need. I estimate it's going to cost me around $1000 to make the conversion from an off road rider to street!

Hatterasguy · #7 03-08-2013, 07:34 PM

That's a sexy bike, I love BMW bikes!

BAVBMW · #8 03-08-2013, 08:03 PM

So we'll be seeing you over at ADV? I'm Hesaid over there, and there's another member here who's over there as well.

MV

tbomachines · #9 03-08-2013, 08:18 PM

Nice ride! Love BMW motorcycles, they're the diesel MBs of the motorcycle world...luxurious but dead reliable and will go for a lonnnnng time

The Clk Man · #10 03-08-2013, 08:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KarTek

Title in honor of Justin!

So, I've been looking for a modern bike off and on, for about 10 years now and I finally found one I really like.

I picked up a 2009 BMW F650GS. It has everything I could ever want in a bike!

I'm looking forward to years of fun rides and I'm about as excited about this as anything in the last few years.

Some advice from an old motorcycle rider, NEVER Armor All the seat.

tbomachines · #11 03-08-2013, 08:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Clk Man

Some advice from an old motorcycle rider, NEVER Armor All the seat.

Trying to get the stench out?

The Clk Man · #12 03-08-2013, 08:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tbomachines

Trying to get the stench out?

Not at all, I put Armor All on the seat to make it shiny. When I started down the road and hit the breaks I slid up the seat and the tank and racked myself on the speedometer.

tbomachines · #13 03-08-2013, 09:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Clk Man

Not at all, I put Armor All on the seat to make it shiny. When I started down the road and hit the breaks I slid up the seat and the tank and racked myself on the speedometer.

Surely repelled by the green wavy stink lines coming off it

KarTek · #14 03-08-2013, 09:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BAVBMW

So we'll be seeing you over at ADV? I'm Hesaid over there, and there's another member here who's over there as well.

MV

Looks like a nice forum. I'll probably join after I read up some more. Hate to be the noob...

KarTek · #15 03-10-2013, 09:16 PM

So, it's been in the high 60's here this weekend and I took it out for a ride to my friend's house 30 minutes away. The bike performs perfectly, it's very stable and it's amazing that I only have to tilt my head one way or another and the bike just follows!

I'm looking for some riding safety and competency classes to round out my skills a little.

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