My tires had about another 1,500 miles on them, but I couldn't pass up the free (after barter) use of Dave's manual tire changer and balancer in one of his 2 backyard sheds. That, plus after 8,734 miles, I did not like those OEM supplied Bridgestone BT-020 tires. We balanced the font rim (no tire) to find the heavy spot, marked it, then put the tire's red dot (light spot) aligned with it to minimize the stick-on weights needed. The front rim's heavy spot was 12 clock minutes (72 degrees) away from the valve stem. With the tire in the perfect spot, the balancer showed it needed no weights!! SWEET!! We're unable to balance the rear wheel for lack of the specific newer BMW rear wheel adapter cones, but the wheel had no balance weights on it originally, so it should be OK (it was).
Friday evening at Dave's, changing the tires went pretty easy, even after being away for 5years from the service dept routines that were refined thru 10 years worth of repetition. We got back home very early about 2:30am Monday morning. Today I finally put the wheels back on and went for a ride. Wow, what a difference! The raised fork tubes and high rear suspension preload needed to make the bike handle good with worn out Bridgestons is now scary dangerous with new Metzeler Z-6 tires. Out on the road I stopped to back out 4 turns of rear preload . . . . and that made it much better, but the fork tube heights will have to be reduced from 15mm to 12mm to dial it in. Oh, yeah, there's no more singing tire whine when leaning into corners.
Thanks Dave & Nancy!! We enjoyed the visit, the 2 nite stay overs, the shared meals, the Blu-Ray movie "Australia", the 1.4GB of MP3 music files and the historic trip to stand tall with 500,000 other like minded patriots.
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