Thursday, June 18, 2009

Day 13 (Real Day 13)

We started the day with my bike not running well.  Our plan was to head down south to the Homer area but my bike wasn’t running well so instead, we hunted down a BMW dealer to find some spark plugs.  We found The Motorcycle Shop and stopped by there and bought a set of plugs for my bike. 

I installed the plugs in their parking lot and took it for a short test.  It wasn’t working any better and appeared to be getting worse, the more I rode it.  So back to The Motorcycle Shop.

This time I talked to their service manager Keith and asked him what he thought my problem could be.  The symptoms were that when you tried to accelerate from any speed, the engine would miss really badly.  He asked when was the last time I replaced the fuel filter (normally this filter is inside the gas tank and only gets changed every 30 to 40k miles but I had moved the filter to the outside so it’s easy to change).  I told him I had put a new filter on before I came to Alaska last year so it had only about 15k miles on a new filter. 

He said I should try another filter and since I had one and it was easy to change, I replaced the old one with a new one.  While I was changing out the filter a guy walked over and said “ I thought BMWs never needed working on".  I looked at him and thought I recognized him but wasn’t really sure until he introduced himself as Greg the writer.  I was totally stunned.  He was Greg Frazier.  He’s been around the world by motorcycle five times and written at least five books about touring on motorcycles of which I own one.

Dr. Greg Fraser & Harry Alder

We stood around and talked to him for probably a half hour and I really enjoyed talking to him.  I had Lyle take our picture together and I took one of Lyle with him even though Lyle had never heard of him. 

Greg has been riding motorcycles around the world for most of his life.  He owns several old Indian motorcycles and several other brands also.  He said he lives half the year in Thailand and the other half in the U.S.  It sounds like the ideal life to me but he says writers don’t make a lot of money and it’s a hard life to get things published. 

He was on his way to Nome, Alaska to ride a little dirt bike around and then write an article for one of the magazines he writes for.  He bought the bike new at the Motorcycle Shop and was flying the bike out to Nome and then he planned on selling it for whatever he could get for it to help pay for the trip. 

I got several pictures of him and will post one in my blog. 

When I finished installing the fuel filter and took the bike for a ride, it worked perfectly.  I figured I was done working on bikes for the day and we could head down to Whittier, Alaska.  Boy was I wrong!

We cruised down towards Whittier and started through the tunnel.  They send cars through the tunnel first and motorcycles last so Lyle and were all by ourselves in the tunnel.  I got almost all the way across the tunnel and managed to stick my front wheel in a rut and plop, the bike goes over on its side.  It wasn’t over on its side very long but when I started it back up and tried it, it seemed to run fine but when I got it out of the tunnel, it didn’t run fine at all.  It was back to missing intermittently for some reason. 

So, we decided it was time to head back to the shop in the morning (the shop was already closed for the day at that time).  So we found a room and waited until the shop opened the next m0rning and take the bike back there to have their BMW Master Mechanic look at it. 

The shop didn’t open until 10am so while we were waiting the next morning, I pulled the valve covers off and checked the valve adjustment settings.  They were a little off due to the number of miles I had put on the bike since the last adjustments (around 15,000 miles or so) but nothing was off drastically at all. 

I tested the bike after doing the valve adjustments but it still ran badly so we went on over to the bike shop and handed it over to the mechanic. 

He hooked his extremely expensive magic BMW computer to the bike and tested it for at least an hour and found nothing!  The bike ran super bad but showed nothing on his computer.  Then he took it outside and ran more tests on it.  Then brought it back in the shop and hooked it to the computer and ran more tests.  Then back outside and then back inside and on the computer again.  This went on for at least four hours without any progress.  Finally, the service manager came out and said they could not fix it because they didn’t know what it was doing wrong as nothing showed on the computer. 

So off we went back to the hotel with a bike that didn’t run well at all.  We did a lot of thinking about what we were going to do the next day to try and fix it or at least find out what it was doing wrong. 

Basically a wasted day! !

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