So... I think I know what the problem is, but when I was riding this morning I lost "drive" all in a sudden: the engine was working fine, but my rear wheel wasn't "connected" to it. There was a broken gears/metal sound coming from somewhere, so I decided to stop. When I put it on the center stand and shifted to different gears, the noise was there and I could move the rear wheel with my hands.
Yes, I'm suspecting of the feared splines failure, and although I've been told that it's probably just the clutch, I'm worried about the input shaft too. The local distributor (TW) charges and arm and a leg for the whole clutch assembly and it doesn't even include the input shaft. I'm thinking of getting something like this instead:
swamper wrote:Take the thing apart before trying to diagnose blindly. Could be any of a number of things. How many miles on the bike????
Hi Swamper, the bike is now at the shop, they say they need to strip it down completely in order to see and do anything. I know that the splines can be inspected from the side after removing the starter engine but the guy kinda refused to do anything else apart from tearing it down. It will will done today, supposedly. The bike is a 2004 R1150R with 76321 kms on the clock (I bought it with around 18k kms on it, but who knows if that was true).
In your experience, what else could be failing or broken here?First thing I thought of was some gear connecting the gearbox and the drive but I don't even know what's the coupling there and I would assume it's more robust than the input shaft.
Yeah, now I'm thinking... what if it's the drive gear that couples with the flywheel teeth? I can't find a picture and I don't know enough about mechanics for describing it any better, but it would be the gear that would engage with this:
If at the shop you should just quit speculating. Seems your coming up with the worst case scenario. Things could be a lot simpler than you expect however for a shop doing this repair you'll have a lot of as long as apart this far you should think about replacing this and that's. Sometimes driveshaft, clutch plate and bearings come to mind at your mileage. Expensive just to have a shop open it up, we do are own work. Spline failure isn't that big of problem percentage wise on these bikes but get lumped in as any final drive problem it seems.
Always interested in what they find, be sure to post it.
Well, I got a video and then I saw it on my own: the input shaft spins freely while the clutch doesn't move at all: the splines on the disc are gone. Not sure about the splines on the input shaft as the motorcycle hasn't been torn down yet.
I need to order today the clutch disc that has the worn out socket and then they will strip down the bike, and then we can evaluate what else to buy.
The guy suggested that "usually" this problem is fixed by installing a whole new clutch assembly, which TBH is just too expensive and I don't think that address all the problems, like for example worn out input shaft or shot shaft bearings. He's a bit too proud and don't want to hear my opinion on this...
02R1100S,05R1100S(BCR), 
(2)-S1000XR 
