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Repair Part II

From the last post, you know that I had to make a few emergency repairs to Maria's bike after the 3 days of rough off road and associated dropping.  Note the quality repair to the indicators and screen (thank God for Duck Tape).  I decided that the pannier system was beyond my competence (I didn't have any angle iron or an oxy-acetylene torch to hand) so turned my attention to the other main problem, the leaking fork seals. 

The left hand one was leaking pretty badly, throwing oil over the tyre and forks.  The origin of the problem was in the UK.  The sliders are quite badly pitted (the previous owner had the misfortune to live in a part of the UK where, even in these days of global warming, the temperature dropped below zero and the council put salt all over the road).  Maria had fitted Touratech fork protectors, but they are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard in the dusty, desert environment we find ourselves in.  Dust and dirt mixes with the oil from the slight seal leak caused by the pitting, it solidifies and then rips the seal even worse.  As you can see from the pictures, the Touratech fork protectors are no match for gravity either!  We needed to replace the seal and get some fork gaiters to stop the same thing happening again, or at least slow the process down. 

We were staying in a small fishing village called Huanchaco but Trujillo, the 3rd biggest town in Peru, was right on the doorstep and as luck would have it, had a whole street full of bike repair and spare parts shops.  We must be able to find the gaiters and someone competent to change the seal there we thought (we had spare seals with us).  We were a bit wary as we'd already investigated the possibility of changing the seal in Pedro Ruis.  Unfortunately the bikes there were all 150cc Chinese things with pencil thin forks and gaiters to match.  Plus I got the impression that they don't bother changing the fork seals in those bikes, or put any oil in the forks for that matter - fork oil, what's that!  We set off to Trujillo with high hopes and found some gaiters in the first shop we tried, which at least were the right diameter.  They were 3 times longer than required, but that could be fixed - no problem.  Right next door was a workshop with a "big" bike outside where the guy seemed to actually know what a fork seal was. They must know what they are doing we thought.  Mmmmm. 

We showed the guy the problem and straight away his mate headed towards the seal intent on trying to prise it out with a big chunky screwdriver - we said we'd get back to him! I'll do it, I thought.  It can't be that hard and I can't do a worse job than a bloke intending to use a chunky screwdriver, plus I'd seen it done back in the UK when we had the suspension set up at MCTechnics and it looked pretty straightforward then.  Of course he had a nice clean workshop and all the tools + he'd done it a million before.  Still. 

I consulted the F650.com website.  There were two sets of instructions, the short ones (about 7 sentences) and the long ones (about 7 pages).  After reading the short version I was confident I could do it.  Then I read the long version which was full of descriptions of all these parts I'd never heard of or had a picture of - this scared me off somewhat.  If I cocked it up there wasn't a BMW bike dealer for several thousand miles to fix it or get spare parts. Discretion became the better part of valour.  We'd read that a little oil can go a long way, so the problem can look a lot worse than it really is, therefore decided to change the oil, so at least we knew there was some oil in the fork, and fit the gaiters we'd found.  This should at least slow down the rate of damage until we found someone we trusted to do the job properly. 

The job had to be done in the hotel car park.  The pictures below tell the story.  The only problem was that I couldn't loosen one of the bolts in the fork brace so the forks had to be removed together.  I didn't want to force it as I knew one of them had a heli-coil repair back in the UK and I didn't want to strip it.  It made draining and re-filling the oil a bit tricky, that and the fact we were using a yoghurt bottle for the waste oil.  We did spill a bit when pumping the fork to get out, what we thought was, the last bit of oil.  Most of it went over my trousers and my precious Meindls.  The stains don't want to come out.  Good job my trousers were "oil" coloured to start with - sort of.   

I shortened the gaiters by cutting the top bit off (I am a quality engineer after all).  Not ideal (as you can see from the photo) but the most important thing was that the bottom fitted well to give as much protection to the seal as possible.  Unfortunately, they'd put the breather holes in the bottom of the gaiters - right next to the seal I was trying to keep the dust off.  I carefully superglued a patch over the hole and moved it to the back, cutting new breather holes at the top (not that I needed to).  It was only after riding the next day I found that there were TWO breather holes at the bottom.  The second I'd carefully positioned at the front!  In hindsight it was a mistake to cut the top off.  I could have cut a section out of the middle and glued the 2 sections together on the crinkly bit with my trusty superglue, but I only thought of this the next day after 2 hours of riding on a dead straight road through the desert.  Despite this, it still looks a lot better than it did before.   

Next job, to get the panniers sorted!  Unfortunately toey can't be fixed with superglue and Duck Tape (unlike most other things you'll find).  That should be a challenge, but they can do anything round here with rebar and a welding torch!

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