Unfortunately, there are lots of places oil can live in these engines besides the sump...
If you run a short distance and stop the bike and let it cool down, a substantial amount of oil will be trapped up in the radiator (since the thermostat will not have opened yet) and you might get a false low reading.
If you read the oil level shortly after shutting down, a lot of oil will be in the various parts of the engine and will not have dribbled back into the sump, again resulting in a false low reading.
Best bet is to run the bike hard enough to open the thermostat, shut off, and leave it till cold before trying to judge the oil level.
We've been running these oilhead engines for a decade now, and I am finding that the less I check the oil, the less confused I get. I believe the 1200's are a bit better about this than the 1100's and 1150's, but there ya go.
We also try to keep the oil around the middle of the glass, rather than topping it to the top of the glass. Too much oil and you end up churning it up and vaporizing it, at which point it gets sucked into the airbox (at least in the US models, which have this system to prevent venting oil to the outside world.) On the 1100's and maybe the 1150's, there are little drainplugs at the bottom of the airbox. Not a bad idea to open those periodically to let the condensed oil out...if that level gets too high, the oil goes into the throttle bodies and the engine...and you start looking like a 2 stroke.
The most annoying thing is to top up the oil only to discover that you didn't need to and that you have now overfilled the oil...
(maybe that is less annoying than blowing up the engine for lack of oil, but it is more likely to happen.)
Mark
LA
