"But I'm the kind of bloke who likes to wave his own spanners at things, and the GS is far much less complicated on that front. No water cooling, no bucket and shim valve adjustment, and life's just too short to fiddle about with messy chains every two days!"
It may be harder to check the valves on a KTM, but try changing the clutch on an R1200GS!! Remove the back of the bike for that on the GS, but a 30 min job on the KTM. It's pretty much horses for courses really, but I really didn't fancy fiddling with my GS whereas I'm much happier spannering my KTM. It'll be interesting to see how you get on - I doubt you'll want to touch much on the GS as you'll risk invalidating the warranty and be in a majorly bad way when something big goes AWOL.
It may be harder to check the valves on a KTM, but try changing the clutch on an R1200GS!! Remove the back of the bike for that on the GS, but a 30 min job on the KTM. It's pretty much horses for courses really, but I really didn't fancy fiddling with my GS whereas I'm much happier spannering my KTM. It'll be interesting to see how you get on - I doubt you'll want to touch much on the GS as you'll risk invalidating the warranty and be in a majorly bad way when something big goes AWOL.

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