Beemer Engineering (A Rant)

I freely admit, I love my Beemers. While I've been riding an assorted stable of BMW's since the 80's, Airheads, Oilheads, KBikes, etc; in 2001, after twenty-four years and over a dozen different styles of machine, I finally found my niche. The GS Gelände/Straße (German: off-road/road). BMW's big bore, dual sport machine.

I also like to wrench my own bikes. Give me a technical manual and there's little, if anything, I won't try to fix or repair myself. It's a challenge to try and disassemble, repair and reassemble without any spare PAA (Parts After Assembly), something engineers have taken such pains to create.

The GS is BMW's number one selling machine in the world. Almost since its inception in 1980, it became the premier Round The World (RTW) touring machine. The GS has taken riders where few motorcycles dare to tread and returned them safely. With this in mind and the fact that repairs will need to be done, most likely on the side of a road in foreign far away lands; I am left to wonder just WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING??? when they designed the bike.

I recently received a number of Touratech goodies for my R1200GSA. One of which was a heavy duty bash plate for the underside of the bike. In order to install the plate, I had to remove the OEM plate that came with the bike. Now, there are four nuts/bolts that hold the bash plate in place. Usually no big deal. There was only one small problem. Between the four nuts/bolts, there are THREE DIFFERENT SIZES!!!, requiring not only three separate sockets in order to remove it, but two different styles to boot. I mean, really, WTF are the BMW engineers thinking? Are they thinking?

I gazed skyward, imploring the Motorcycle Gods to enlighten me as to who in their right mind would design a machine of this caliber, knowing full well it will be ridden to hell and back, all over the world, with these types of incredibly stupid flaws? Does common sense have no place in the universe anymore? The God's, being Gods and thus having little time for mere mortals, chose to ignore me. Space is at a premium on a motorcycle as it is. The last thing a RTW Adventure Rider wants to deal with is having a pack a toolkit the size of Wisconsin just to effect repairs somewhere on the road. Why could the four nuts/bolts for this plate not be one uniform size?

I aim to try and find out.