Old BMW's! You may hate them or you may love them. Either way they are virtually bullet proof and seem to keep on going. I have an 89 R100GS that I used for a back up bike for my motorcycle tours here in the South of France.....it has 220,000km on the clock and then some. It's outlived all of my other bikes (Triumph Speed Triple, Triumph Daytona, Suzuki GSXR 750 etc etc) and still gets used for trips to Spain, Andorra, Corsica and Italy. Like Andrew says at that kind of mileage they owe you nothing. Talk about cheap motorcycling. Shame that BMW don't make em as good as they used too. Plus on the older ones you can literally tear them apart at the side of the road should the need (hopefully not) arise....and normally fix them...There's none of this several hundred pound servicing either....a good ol' Haynes, a bit of common sense, a set of decent spanners and watch as your annual dealer servicing costs drop to virtually zero. I think I've spent maybe the equivalent of £50 at my local BMW specialists...in the past two years!! I've ordered parts off the net, but they are plentiful and cheap. Plus the tyres last forever. I get around 20,000km on a rear and around 25,000 on a front.....a drastic change from my sportsbikes where I was changing them once a month at between 3 & 5,000km. There really is something to be said for older bikes.
Ride safe, Martin www.st-georges-fr.com
Posted: 10/06/2008 at 12:04
