Rear Drive bearing failure

[capeGS]

A while back my 850GS suffered a bearing failure on the rear wheel and lead to a considerable repair bill. It had only completed a mere 12k and was about 3.5 years old. I complained but sadly had to pay up.

Now, a friend of mine, in the process of buying a K1200LT (arm chair on wheels), has discovered there have been many such failures on the LT's and on the whole BMW paid up even though some claims were out of warranty.

Does anyone else have a similar experience with the GS? Did you manage to get BMW to pay and was the whole drve shaft unit replaced? I'd appreciate your responses if you can substantiate a general trend.

Thanx.

 

[MikeO]

Cape,

do a search for 'Final Drive' - it's not an uncommon failure. Mine went at 68k and just over 2 years old (and took the driveshaft with it). BMW paid 80% of the parts price as a goodwill gesture.

Mike

 

[Tsiklonaut]

So far the best cure seems to be chainging final drive oil every 10K kilometres along with engine oil intervals. I recommend doing it for gearbox too, change all 3 oils (engine, final drive, gerbox) oils at the same time.

Some dudes here have stock final drives gone over 250K kilometres

Cheers, Margus

 

[MikeO]

Whereas I'm not arguing that 10k km oil changes can't do any harm, there's no evidence to suggest that not doing so will cause a failure Margus.

Have a look around www.advrider.com and do a search for rear drive failures - they occur apparently randomly over a vast variety of maintenance schedules, on road use, off road use etc - they've been unable to come up with any statistical answer as to what causes it (other than, perhaps, badly shimmed bearings in manufacture - which is going to be just about impossible to detect in advance).

Mike