keepemflying
Electrical issues, a legacy bike and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
By Matthew Parkhouse #13272 A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO,
I HELPED
out a friend of mine from the old hotline days who had an R 100/7. In the course of doing a routine tune up, he called me, say- ing, “I’ve vaporized the advance unit, can you help?” I had a pretty good idea of what had happened—it involved a bit of care- lessness with the front cover while the hot
diode board was still attached to the ground batteries. The non-running Slash Seven arrived on a trailer; we rolled it off and into my yard, and I got to work. Sure enough, my friend John had managed to hit the front
engine cover “just right” to complete the circuit between the lower part of the diode board (that is hot, as in straight-to- the-battery) and the advance unit at the same moment in time. One of the little posts and part of the spring that con- trols the rate of advance, had indeed been “vaporized.” I’ve collected a small box of these advance units over the years (a good thing, as they are now “NLA” through BMW parts channels; the last price when these WERE available was a shocking $265). I swapped the damaged advance unit for a good one (charging him far less than $265), and the bike was ridden back home. It was too nice of a day to put it back on the trailer. I thought that this was one of those “one off” events that I
would never, ever see again. Well, sure enough, a local fellow rode into the yard last week saying that he had done some- thing similar. After isolating the battery, the front cover was removed to reveal an obviously damaged advance unit. The gentleman had used a file and fine-toothed hacksaw to recut the remainder of the post that holds the spring. We agreed that it seemed a little precarious, so I dug out an advance unit that had a scored rubbing lobe and took it apart to get the part that holds the pair of springs. I have gotten pretty good at pulling these little mechanisms apart to clean and lubricate them on a once-every-decade basis. After replacing the unit, I did a quick timing-light check of the timing, and he went on his way. Once the long and cold winter finally broke and the
weather was nice to get out riding, we decided to paint the house! We’re going at it one side at a time. The over-the-head work is mine; Susanna doesn’t do ladders. The south-facing side is done, so I have a nice, clean work area outside the shop double doors. The ladders are up against the west side of the house, and I put in a couple of “high up” painting
52 BMW OWNERS NEWS September 2015
The rear parts are from a healthy advance unit. The plate in the foreground is the one that was “zapped” when the front engine cover bumped into it and contacted the lower side of the diode board. This the second one of these I have encountered in my 40+ BMW years. Be carefull! Those advance units were shockingly expensive before they went NLA.
hours in the mornings and spend a few more hours recovering. While I was doing “high” work, a local friend, Ted, rolled in on his R 90/6 and told me he had some “electrical irregularities.” Our Colorado morn- ings are just too splendid to bring a project into the shop, so we started to remove tank and covers outside. This bike is a bit unusual because of its painted tank. The owner
before Ted had no idea what the “weird faces” painted on the tank meant or were about. The artist had signed the work so Ted started doing a bit of online research. Turns out that the creator of the odd tableau, Eric Talbot, was the creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur- tles! Since he had never seen his painted tank on a bike, Ted was happy to send a bunch of photos. Ted had been considering painting over the faces to have a more “normal” BMW paint scheme but decided to leave it as it was to honor the story. Makes ME smile whenever the R 90 shows up. This time Ted and the bike came over because the red “GEN” dash lamp was intermittent.
TECH
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