Airhead Engine Durability

[kbasa]

The dealer I purchased my R80RT from back in 84, had at the time 400,000 miles on his 74 R90S. When he wrecked it, it was over 500,000.

My best friend is riding a 79 R100RT that has over 200,000 miles.

Yeah so cylinders have been redone or heads, I agree they are old tech. Some of the new tech ideas in my mind didn't work out as planned. I for one am not a fan of the early nikasail cylinders as mine didn't last even a 100,000 miles before I had to rebuild. That is a long story and no, I didn't rebuild with nikasail jugs.

I did have valve recession at hight miles and rebuilt the heads.

As for the charging system, I have had to replace the brushes a couple of times before I installed a higher amp charging system. I don't have my log book on hand so I can't say when that happened but the charging system went a long way before the change without only brush changes.

Foolishly I changed the ignition system for an Alpha system because I was having cut out problems. After changing the system and two years of farting around, the cut out problem was solved and turned out to be a possible bad ground. Nothing to do with the ignition system at all. I believed the ads suggesting better performance with the Alpha system over the stock and hey, I was riding a bike that would quit running at any time so, presto an Alpha system was installed. To my dismay, there was no improvement in performance, and it didn't solve the problem. Again, this whole incident is a long long story catch me sometime and I will bore you with it.

High miles on airheads has been touted for years as they have been ridden for years. What I would like to see is if in 30 or 40 or 50 years, the current crop of wonder bikes has made the same claim to high mileage. LOL, oops, I won't be around. St.

When I bought my 98 VFR brand new, plenty of folks on the Big List (remember that?) forecasted it would dissolve into its base molecules. 25 years later, I still have it, it's still happy and has like 65K miles on it. I've replaced a couple regulator/rectifiers, but the last one I installed was in 2001, so I think that's sorted. Other than that, it ate a brake proportioning valve, but that's been it. I'll probably swap all the rubber brake lines with stainless steel since they're really old now and I like good brakes.

My 95 Ducati was fine, as well, though it only had 27K miles on it. That's a lot of riding for a sport bike, but it was utterly reliable the entire time I had it, more than a decade.

So, I guess there are a couple of bikes from the 90s. One a dedicated sporting motorcycle that changed the face of racing and bike styling and another one that is a high performance GT bike with a nifty V4.

I think that with water cooled engines, FI, and similar advancements, BMW's longevity reputation isn't necessarily unique any more.

 

[brownie]

The “Big LIst”

That was excellent !!!!

 

[guenner]

Airhead engine can be expected to run

With or without you HAVE TO work on the bike before you have a major failure?

My 1989 R100GS had 190 Tmiles when I sold her. The first required work was a new starter at 42 Tmiles and a new drive shaft at 57 Tmiles.

I was only ONCE stranded on the road when a drive shaft had a catastrophic failure at 105 Kmiles.

Eventually I had to replace the motor block.

I think we have to mention all the work done/needed to reach a certain mileage to get a more realistic answer.