I will not work on Red in the Middle of the Night…

I will not work on Red in the Middle of the Night.

I will not work on Red in the Middle of the Night…

I will not work on Red in the Middle of the Night…

As my day job has taken more time lately, I have had less time to work on this as much as I like. I am a night owl, and used to getting less sleep than most people. Most nights, I will get 5 hours, but 3 or 4 hours is not uncommon. So, I recently caused a near disaster by working too late and not thinking clearly.

If you’ve read the previous posts, you may have noticed that I had put the motor in the frame along with the swing arm. I had left the gearbox out since I was waiting to reassemble it at a local(ish) BMW Tech Day event. I’ll post separately on that, but it was awesome. A couple weeks ago, I was working on small bits for the project until around 2AM when I decided to dry-fit the gearbox.

Shockingly (not), it did not fit in the frame with the swing arm and motor already in place. Having read about rapid clutch changes on other BMWs involving removing the rear motor bolt and pivoting the motor forward to provide room to get the gearbox out and back in without removing the swing arm, I began to look at the geometry and figured it would work. I decided to prepare everything for that approach so I could install the gearbox in the morning. This is when “tired Bill” proved to be smart enough to see it was possible, but dumb enough to plow ahead without thinking it through completely.

When I tapped the rear motor bolt out, I discovered that the majority of the weight was being supported by the small scissors lift under the oil pan and not by the jack stands supporting the frame. I also discovered that I can, in fact catch a motorcycle and stop it from falling without suffering injury. Barely. With the removal of that rear bolt, the motor was free to pivot forward in the frame, which it enthusiastically did. The result was the frame lurching forward until the forks were stopped by the Handy Lift’s deck. Then, the steering head turned and the bike began to fall sideways because the jack stands were not centered well enough to support the now floppy frame from side to side. Fortunately, it fell towards me. Gravity providing no room for compromise, I was going to stop the bike one way or the other. 

I was able to keep the bike on the stands and get it balanced enough to begin blocking and strapping everything into a stable enough condition. It was still a bit more precarious than I would like, so I opted to proceed to install the gearbox so I could get everything back into a proper and secure placement. There are no photos of this embarrassment since I was more focused on solving the problem, but the end result was that the gearbox is in and everything is fine. Mostly.

In the rush, I failed to remember two important steps with the gearbox that led to a good deal of added effort. First, I neglected to connect the leads to the neutral switch in advance. Since these are in an almost inaccessible location, it took a good bit of fiddling to get them connected. Second, I neglected to insert the clutch throwout rod before putting the gearbox in. At about 4AM, dumb and tired Bill realized that he had wasted two hours by not thinking through the issue and he had no real choice but to remove the swing arm to install the throwout rod. Since that entire process took about 10 minutes the next day, it was obviously the right choice from the beginning.

I will also have to adjust the forks again, as there is now some stiction at full compression. Not much, but more than I am willing leave. Assuming that goes well, I am looking at another hour or so to correct the blunder of not simply removing the swing arm. Yay.

Tired Bill is clever. Just not nearly clever enough. Lesson learned. Always get some sleep before monkeying around with complex geometry, physics, and heavy objects. Oh, I’ll add power tools to that list for good measure.

I will not work on Red in the Middle of the Night.

I will not work on Red in the Middle of the Night.

I will not work on Red in the Middle of the Night…