Saturday, 31 Oct 2009
When the center stand didn’t retract after getting gas yesterday I had a good idea what was going on. Yep. One of the pivot bolts had snapped leaving the stand held by only one side. This is a known failure on at least the older (curved brace) center stands.
Pivot pin
The part sticking out is the pivot pin. You can see the end of the bolt in the middle of the pin. What you can’t see from this angle is that the head half of the bolt is missing. The pivot pin should be flush with the frame.
Cheap spring removal tool
Inner spring
A hand full of pennies makes a cheap spring removal tool. I couldn’t get the pennies to stay in place for the inner spring so I just levered it off the top pin with a screwdriver while moving the stand up and down to give the spring some stretch.
Brake pedal link
For some reason BMW wanted the brake linkage unhooked. It’s not necessary to do so, but I did find the parts a bit dry. I cleaned and greased the moving parts and re-connected the pin. Now back to the center stand.
Remains of broken screw
Screw extracted
I removed the center stand completely so I could check the screw on the other side. It is fine, but I’ll likely replace it anyway, keeping the original as a spare. The screws come “micro encapsulated” with thread locker from BMW.
The broken end needed to be removed from the pivot pin. Drilling the end (counter clockwise) with an extractor generated enough heat to loosen the thread locker (although I think it is only medium strength). The blue bits in the picture is thread locker.
GS sans center stand
I rode the bike less center stand to the dealer only to find that they don’t have the needed part in stock. Grumble. Looks like I’ll be without the center stand for a while.