Follow-up: Fuel leak

[OU812]

If it is fully insured I would drag it to the dealers and see what they say. Nothing wrong with making a claim.

[toolinalong]

Call me #2.

Happened 20 miles east of Gallipolis Ohio in West Virginia, on June 15 at 1pm.

Cruising along nice and easy on a 2 lane country road, start of the 4th week of a 6 week trip.

Suddenly smoke starts pouring out from under the tank, the horn starts blasting, and the engine shuts off.

Long story, short version:
Dead short of the primary cables turned out to be the culprit, took out the battery and a few other things, but the Motronic and the ABS unit survived.

16 days and $2400 later (and I did most of the labor myself), I am home. Kent Holt at Holt BMW in Athens Ohio is made of the right stuff.
He let me work on it in his shop, offering tools and assistance as I needed them, but mostly he and his small crew (Bill the mechanic, Marvin the parts guy, and Nancy his wife) were just downright friendly and helpful.
In that respect I really got lucky.

I am still experiencing some problems (it is running kinda funky, I am still tracking it down), but got her home, so now I can take my time sorting out the rest of it at my leisure.

[challey]

toolingalong - I feel your pain.
Either we are the 2 most luckless oilhead owners ever or BMW has yet another engineering/manufacturing issue. At least my meltdown happened in my driveway.

I've PM'd you on this subject and look forward to hearing the details.

Charlie
(still without a working bike in Folsom, PA)

[CycleRob]

The bike laying on it's side, 3 times over a period of years certainly could put battery acid on/in the wire harness. In the 2nd pic below the fueltank one, look at the press-2-release wire clip and how corroded it is from the H2SO4. That clip is supposed to be shiny chrome!

The CAN-bus system power management would not allow this short to happen and the maintenance free sealed battery is very less likely to leak when tipped on it's side. Also, with the CAN-bus system there isn't that many wires!! Only just a few. I'm seeing benefits of the safety, simplicity, self diagnostics and lower cost of that new system, especially now that the costly vulnerabilities of complexity and serious flaws of the old system surface. It's a technological advancement comparable to breaker points and digital electronic ignition. On my F800ST, even the 1,300 RPM fast idle on cold engine start-up isn't that fast, yet it immediately runs dead even and very smoothly because it has such precise programming and component control. Even if I hold down the starter button and then turn on the key . . . . the starter runs a ½ second later, the engine starts immediately and it goes thru the tach/speedo full needle sweeps and sequential test of all the indicator lites. No throttle, no intervention required. Knowing much of what it takes to accomplish those tasks that well, I am impressed.

Just like those ultra reliable electronic ignitions, I'm confident it will never have a BSOD, Ctrl-Alt-Del episode.

.

[OU812]

Time for Rob to become The salesman for BMW.

[challey]

cyclerob said:

The bike laying on it's side, 3 times over a period of years certainly could put battery acid on/in the wire harness.

Not to put too fine a point on things but, any damage from leaking H2SO4 would have to have been caused by a single tipover - the first one back in 2004. That is the only time the bike could have had a battery capable of leaking. I never saw the original battery - the dealer replaced it with a gel-type, sealed unit in 2005 - so it's possible that there could have been a conventional wet-cell type in place as the bike came from the factory in 2003.

The last 2 times the bike was down though, it was with a sealed battery so I'd think there's no (or at least a vanishing low) possibility of leakage. The really odd thing about any acid leakage is that with the exception of a small spot (about 1/4" x 1") on the battery tray on the opposite side of the harness, there is virtually no corrosion damage.

I wonder if the acid could have been in the form of vapor, rather than liquid, that penetrated the wire harness cover and condensed inside?

Charlie

[spoon]

On the corrosion in the wires. A couple of years ago I was involved in an after fire investigation where corrosion in a wireway was the cause of the fire due to high resistence. We found undamaged wires that had corrosion a full 2 feet up the wire from the connector. This was under undamaged insulation. We later looked at another facility that was less than 5 years old and had pressurized clean air in the wireway to keep corrosive vapors out. Corrosion was on most of the fuse connections.
I think it is a modern miracle that bikes, given the extremes they operate in, hold up as well as they do. My point in this is to suggest that an annual inspection of all wiring is not a bad idea.