Getting ready,and my DR650SE...

Pre Flight testing new gear.

Well its now seven days before we fly out of our home town Alice Springs. Being a nice Saturday morning we had arranged to go for a mid morning ride and brunch at our favorite café; the Water Tank Café.  This is run by our Scouting mentors Chris and Lyn, we get great meals and the VERY best coffee in the Alice!  Also giving Deb and I an excuse to do some more tests on the new intercom system we have.

Deb, getting ready.



 

We met up with Werner and Claudia at their place and then heading on a short ride around the Ilparpa road loop and then off to the Water Tank Cafe' for a great brunch.

Leaving their Cabin.



Werner and Claudia

Through Honeymoon Gap.

The sad story of my Dead DR650SSE.

Well as Deb mentioned in the first blog post we also own a DR650 (2008) single cylinder trail bike. I had prepared this bike for my planned solo tour through Russia’s Siberia, Mongolia, Russia, then “ The Stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan), Turkey (meet up with Deb), Greece, ferry to Italy and then back to Western Europe.

This trip was going to take me 5 months to complete, and the DR was supposed to be the bike I would use.

But… Like all good plans, events take place that change your plans and this has happened for this trip. But as it turns out this change has saved me some stress…

While riding the DR home about 4 weeks ago, after my shift ended (about 20:00).  Just before I turned off the Stuart Highway onto the Airport road heading back  into town (10kms from town). I down changed gears from 5^th gear to 4^th gear, at 85kmh. All hell broke loose inside the crankcases with loud crunching and rear wheel locking up and skidding and unlocking and skidding, engine dead stalled.

I managed to keep the bike up right and did not hit the pavement! Which I am very happy about!! Anyhow I got rescued and later got the engine stripped down to reveal what had happened to it.

RHS crankcase side, broken internal case structure.



3rd gear remains.




LHS Crankcase side, lower cylinder barrel, part view of balancer shaft gear.




Crank, conrod, piston, all DBR (damaged beyond repair).




scrap metal



what to do, repair or scrap.

There is a known issue that (see thread) that some DR’s (mine among them) suffer a problem with the 3^rd gear splitting off the splined final drive shaft. When this happens whilst the bike is travelling at speed it is usually curtains for the engine, which it is for mine.  3^rd gear is a heavily used gear in the DR engines. It is the driven gear for 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th gears. It has dog gears(tabs on the side of the gear) that engage the other 2 gears when they are used, and it is the ‘driven’ gear so is under more load that the others gears. Suzuki (Australia) do not offer complete engines as spare parts (unlike trusty BMW). So I have a quote for a complete engine in parts from Suzuki, $6400 (approx) plus the labour to do the work. Normaly you'd add the same amount as the labour cost ($12,800). Not a viable option, as the basic bike only cost me $6000 with 840kms.

So if I had been on my way through the Russian Far East (Siberia) and the bike had suffered this failure, I’d have a broken bike and been traveling on a train trip across Russia looking for a port to ship or leave it/sell it some where…

I call this Luck, while others tell me its fate… Luckily XRV750’s suffer a different set of problems, fuel pumps and regulator among them. But engine destruction is not one of the common problems…

Suzuki Australia.

I knew my DR was one year out of warranty, so I did not expect Suzuki Australia to be willing to help. But I thought I would at least tell them what had happened, and I thought (silly me) that they would be interested in the engine number and frame number for their data base.

But no, the guy on the phone from the warranty section was just like John Cleese in those Customer Training videos I’ve seen. He told me that I had ‘likely used the bike’ and possibly taken it “off road”, it’s a trail bike after all. Anyhow talking to this nerd (turd) only made me feel worse and I wonder why I even thought they would care?…

So different to when I have rung (or emailed) BMW with bike troubles. Yes you pay more for them, but they do care and they do something to fix your problem.

Now I just need BMW to make a single cylinder 450cc – 650cc air cooled trail bike (not much chance of this) …

Seven days to go ….

Cheers,

Stephen and Debbie.