The Threadless Nut

Well, the F650 is officially gone, picked up this evening. While I’m certainly glad to have the space back and I love the new bike, there was a bit of a twinge of sorrow as we loaded it onto the truck. It was my first bike and it served well, I hope it will do so for the new owner.

Cue photo montage with sappy music….. not really.

Picked up and installed the new Voltage Regulator from Max BMW in Troy today. Voltage indicates all is well. Crisis averted.

Yesterday Erica is running a bit late to pick up Declan at my parent’s house, so I decide that I should ride over there and take him off their hands in case they have some plans. So, I hop on and start the bike up, it seems to crank a little slowly, but it fires up quickly and I just figure it’s been sitting a couple of days. (We’re about to see some evidence of how often I am completely wrong.)
I get almost all the over to the folks and the bike starts sputtering, I reach down and flick the reserve, even though the odometer doesn’t indicate I should be out for another 100 miles or so (no fuel gauge on this bike). No help from that and just as I’m cresting the hill it dies. Lights are dim and it won’t crank at all, indicating a flat battery. I try and pop start it, but it just sputters for a second and dies again.
Fortunately for me, it’s downhill all the way to the parent’s house, so I just coast down there. I put the charger on the battery and it’s really sucking the juice, so the battery is indeed dead. After charging for a while it starts up fine, but a meter on the battery indicates that it isn’t getting a charge. Uh Oh, Sad Beemer
Anyway tracked it down to the voltage regulator and will have to find a replacement part.

So, I took my sweet time getting the bike out. I never posted what happened at the end of the season last year, but I ended up having a mouse living in the tail and he was chewing up some of the wiring. I quickly decided that I needed to find better storage for the winter, so a friends garage became the vacation home. It was too bad as I could have ridden a little longer, but it wasn’t worth risking more damage to the machine.

Anyway, I finally got over there and got the battery charged up and brought it home. Started right up, which is always a good thing. I’m looking forward to another season of riding, and hopefully some better storage on my own property this winter.

So, I finally did it. Today I picked up a new to me, 1999 BMW F650 from AJ Cycle in Gill, MA. It’s black, the fastest color, and I think it will be a good bike for me. Since it was snowing out when I brought it home, Erica suggested, yes really, that I put it in the living room. Am I a lucky guy or what?