Lost In Translation: A Triumph over BMW By Kris Loewe

I have two friends who ride big K1200LT BMWs.  I’m partially to blame for their choice of steeds.  Both Eric and John started out on some older Japanese bikes and suffered the ills that affect older machines.  Owning stuff made in this century, I figured their bikes would no longer migrate to my work bench.  I was wrong.

I don’t know what it is about large touring machines, but many of them seem to find their way to me.  Goldwings.  I’m sick of Goldwings, but the owners write good checks.  Venture Royals thankfully have not followed me from my days at RPM Motorwerks, nor have Kawasaki Voyagers.

John’s LT came to me first.  It had burst the rear master cylinder brake line and bled out its brake fluid.  Part in hand, he and Eric pulled in one lazy Sunday and it was replaced after much fiddling and consternation.  Removal of the plastic or “Tupperware” body parts was done by him.  I replaced the line and bled the brakes mechanically.  BAM!  Done.  Sage advice was given to John by me:  Forget the BMW badge, don’t be afraid to work on it yourself.  He has since bravely moved forward with other repairs.

Eric brought his 2002 K1200LT by for the very same problem in late October 2011.  It was the same brake line and the system had bled dry.  Unfortunately his bike has intergrated ABS or iABS brakes.  Undertaken on a Sunday morning, I had soon backed myself into a corner with this one.  It won round one and I drove Eric home with his whale of a motorcycle beached on my Handy Lift.

The evening was spent diving into the KLT owners’ group websites and some other polite well-meaning BMW owners’ musings.  Not arriving at anything definitive, I knew that there was a bleeding sequence I was missing as I was faced with (excluding the caliper bleed screws) seven other bleed screws for the ABS module.  Standard mechanical vacuum bleeding would not cut it.  The owner’s groups were helpful in learning how to “change” or flush the system, but there was no guidance on restoring a dry system.  Their advice was simply, “Put it together, limp it to the dealer, open your wallet, wait for them to call you when it’s ready.”  No offense to the dealers, but for something as simple as a hydraulic braking system, an owner with reasonable mechanical skills and a basic tool kit should be able to perform maintenance and repairs of this nature in a motel parking lot if necessary.  I should think that the kind Bavarian engineers and their lawyers are very aware of the thin network of BMW dealers worldwide and how risky it would be limping one of these things 100 miles without brakes to the nearest dealer only to find mechanics as bewildered as they are.

That Tuesday I put in a call to Shannon Logan at Gateway BMW.  It turns out this very problem had caused him much grief as the procedure is not in the LT manual.  Rather they found it by accident in the K1200RS manual.  The secret motorcycle mechanic handshake was shared when I visited, and I walked away with a 25 page printout, of which only two pages were relevant.

Armed with the proper sequence and an affirmation of what I’d already figured out, I set off to Sears, Lowe’s and Napa Auto Parts to gather my special tools.  The actual bleeding wrench from BMW costs $200 or so.  I made one by cutting an $8 Craftsman 7mm combination wrench then MIG welding the round end back on at 90 degrees.  I then welded a ¼ drive socket to the wrench handle the ground the outer diameter of the end so it would fit in the tiny spaces where two bleeder screws were hidden.  Then I bought a spare 10 x 1.00 mm bleeder screw at Napa.  While there I picked up a small funnel that did not have much of a taper.  Then it was off to Lowe’s to buy an assortment of vinyl tubing.

Home made brake fluid “Bimmer Bong”, bleeder tool and offending brake hose.

Eric had already removed the right side Tupperware on Sunday.  I commenced removing the left hand side.  This proved useful as I did not pay attention when Eric removed the right side.  This exposed two bleeder screws I could not otherwise access.  Even though the literature leads you to use the servo motors with the key on to bleed the system, the literature fails to tell you that you need to mechanically bleed an open system first.  This important step is lost somewhere in translation from German into English, or the legal department intervened and simply did not want to risk an owner carrying out this procedure.  Nevertheless, the “rear” reservoir (which on the LT is the front half of the reservoir under the seat) was topped by taking my $1.50 plastic funnel fitted with 5/8 OD vinyl tubing on the tip of the funnel…creating a sealed auxiliary reservoir ($234.00 from BMW, $34.00 from the Boneyard).

Because the reservoir is so tiny, it needs extra fluid on demand so the bleed procedure is uninterrupted.  After vacuum bleeding through the caliper (not in the directions, but necessary for the rear circuit), I placed my home-made bleeder wrench on the first bleed screw followed by yet another piece of vinyl tubing to direct the fluid down to my drain cup.  Push, turn, repeat….repeat…repeat….BUBBLES!  Yea!  Completing the sequence rewarded me with a firm foot pedal at last!  Now for the fun:  Flushing the circuit.

I topped off my “Bimmer Bong” funnel tool with half a pint of fluid, turned on the key, let the ABS circuit test itself, hooked up a tube to the rear caliper bleeder, cracked it with an 11mm wrench and pushed down on the rear brake pedal.  Weeeeeeee!   The servo really moved the fluid out and filled up my cup within two seconds.  Bleeding and flushing of the rear circuit was finally complete.

For grins, since I had all the Tupperware off, I decided to service the front brakes.  Since the front system had not been opened, the procedure is reversed.  Flush first, bleed the “front” ABS circuit manually last with the battery removed to access a hidden bleed screw.  This is a smart step as removing the battery resets any soft codes in the ECM.  After the battery is installed, the TPS (Throttle Position Sensor) is reset by turning on the ignition, slowly twisting the throttle to the stop and back twice, then switching the key off.

Anyone can do this in a motel parking lot right?  Well, yes actually if you carry your home-made bleeder wrench in your BMW tool kit and there’s a hardware store or a Walmart nearby.  I guess remembering the manual bleed sequence would be handy too.   I’d take a crack at doing it in front of the Comfort Inn sitting on a milk crate.  Of course I’d rather prefer the luxury of my Handy Lift and the accoutrements of my humble workshop.

An hour was spent replacing the Tupperware and wiping off greasy fingerprints.  Then I backed it off the bench and test rode it.  The ABS light dutifully winked out after the first twenty feet rolling forward completed its test sequence and it stayed out.  I’d never ridden an LT before, so I rolled down to Collinsville and back on Route 157 and found it a very capable machine.  The wind protection was superior…and disturbing.  It’s so good that 90 mph seems like 50 on any other bike.  I’d have a dozen speeding tickets if I owned one of these.

The servo assist takes a little getting used to, but I found the brakes to be excellent.  I tried putting out of my mind the fact that a computer was actually stopping me.  Rather than fight the technology, I quite marveled at it really.  At its heart, however, it is still a simple hydraulic system.  It just has more moving parts than a traditional machine.

I had won round two.  I looked at my Tiger sitting in the corner next to the LT.  It is four years newer, has half the technology….and mass… and I was trained by Triumph of North America to work on it.  It is a bridge machine that took me from the world of carburetors and points, to ECMs and fuel injection.  As sophisticated as it is, any problems I’ve had come down to basic mechanical intuition.  The LT is no different, it’s just on a larger scale.  I could not have fixed one without the other, though.  It could be said I had a “Triumph” over BMW.  Did I hear you groan?  Eric gets the last laugh because his bike is faster.

Copyright 2011- Kris Loewe. Used with permission by the EMU