Engine management problems

[Sooty09]

Just finished a 7000 mile tour to the Black sea and Greece. The bike was running great through Romania and Bulgaria, but towards the back end of the Greek week the bike lost power, popped and banged and the warning light came on. After limping back to the B&B I phoned BMW assist. A few hours later a car recovery van turned up, the plan was for me to follow the van to Lefkas town, leave the bike at his garage, two days later a van from the local dealer would call and pick it up and perhaps four or five days later they may get a chance to fix it. There was no plan for me to get to the dealer and no plan at all for my wife who was on her own bike.
I did not take up the rescue plan, It was two days before the bail out was needed and I had a ferry to Italy booked. The following day the bike started OK and ran nice between 2300RPM and 2900RP, nothing above or below and the throttle had very little effect. I managed to ride the 130 miles to Patra catch the ferry and next day ride to a BMW dealer in Lecce. They plugged in the diagnostics, wiped a few error codes and loaded the latest software. No problem since but they had no explanation for what had gone wrong.
I was lucky, the region the problem occurred was not too remote compared to the previous few weeks riding. Perhaps carrying a gs911 device would have solved the problem, probably not. Just too complicated now and before I go so far away from civilisation I will have to think about a truly suitable bike. Nice as it is the BMW 1200GS is not that bike.

 

[malcopopolo]

Interesting - All modern bikes have electronics that when they play up are a headache. You need to use a bike from the mid 80s or early nineties or alternatively go for a susuki 1250 bandit.

As the bike went into limp mode, Is it possible it was very poor fuel?

 

[Sot1200]

Bad fuel. That's all it was. Greek 95 octane is terrible and if you were unlucky it may even had some water or other fluids in it. Fresh fuel and off you go.

 

[Sot1200]

Their 100 octane fuel is excellent even though expensive but you can recover so of the cost by better fuel economy. I was getting 1/2 liter per 100 km better mileage.

 

[ATG]

Besides the mentioned possibility of bad gas I wonder if disconnecting the battery for a while, perhaps some 30 minutes, could reset the bike's computer ?

On an earlier GSW on an occasion when I wanted to change the settings the button was unresponsive. I switched the bike off, tried again with equal (no) results.

I've disconnected the battery, waited some 10 to 15 minutes, reconnected the battery and all was working perfectly.

At the dealership the next day the computer had one error shown for the ESA. It was erased and some new software was loaded and it never happen again.

My point is that on that occasion and with that particular problem disconnecting the battery made it work again. Has anybody else experienced this type of temporary solution ?

 

[Neil W]

If there was water in the fuel ,new fuel and a reset would not cure it ,the water would still be in the tank and filter.

More likely and electronics glitch which should not have occured.

It would be interesting to know what the ecu error codes were ?

 

[Sooty09]

I had half a tank of fuel when the problem started, my wife,s F700 also had the same fuel with no problems. I filled up with 100 octain racing fuel as they call it for the run to the ferry port and the problem continued. The same fuel was in the tank after the diagnostics and the problem had vanished. Maybe bad fuel causes the faults to be logged and nothing will cure the problem until reset on a computer????? but in developing countries this will be a common problem.
Any chance of a dealer reset in Mongolia or Central Africa. The fault sheet should be sent to BMW for a warranty claim so AJs should eventually find out what the codes were.
Shame really as the bike was otherwise running perfectly, 72 mpg, tyre life in the region of 10,000 miles each, 20000+ miles front pads 15000+ miles rear pads despite riding on miles of dirt and gravel roads and used 0 oil.