Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/1345276
March 2021 2718 with the U-Haul;s get up and go, and he was having too much fun ripping Route 12 over Lolo Pass in a U-Haul. Once back in McCall we tore into the final drive to see how it worked and how bad the damage was. As a buddy has said, "BMW designs motorcycles as if nobody ever built a motorcycle before". A good descrip on, I think. The BMW final drive is more like a rear wheel drive car differen al than the final drive of any other bike I've worked on. A ring and pinion with two bearings that must be preloaded just so in order to get reasonable service life from them. The smaller of the two bearings is a tapered roller bearing which usually means a tapered roller bear- ing or angular contact bearing is on the other end of the sha . Not here. The plain 120mm diameter ball bearing is $165 from BMW and the angular contact version is 2.5x that, if you can find it. Somebody in product development may have needed to re- duce build cost, I suspect. The singular failure point seemed to be the 120mm bearing and the similar sized seal. Ge ng the old bearing off took lots of pa ence, tapping with cold chisels, and a li le bit of heat. Pu ng the new bearing on was easy peasy. The pinion spends a night in the freezer and, the next day, the bearing spends a few minutes feeling the business end of a heat gun…..and the bearing drops right on. No hammer required. The new bearing shakedown ride was a few weeks later when the old girl got loaded up and ridden from McCall to Durango, CO via Salt Lake City. From Durango she went up the Million Dollar Highway through Silverton and on to Glenwood Springs where Pete picked us up and we headed east toward home in 18° F weather. It was a fine adven- ture that has le me hungry for more and filled with ideas for future excursions. Final thoughts — Going back and staying at The Lochsa Lodge the night before riding the Lolo Motorway on a 690 or an 890 is near the top of my unfinished bizness list. As is riding the IDBDR at a leisurely pace in order to explore, stop and meet the locals, and hang with bikers. I'm humbled by the kindness of motoheads everywhere. Kathy at Hamilton U-Haul could run a Fortune 500 company, I'm here to tell you. Un l next month's adventure, keep the studded rubber side down. JB