Fixing the clutch

When we realized that exchanging the fuel did not fix the problem the next thing to do was to replace the slave cylinder.

On Monday at 3:30pm Central Time I called the BMW dealership in Fort Worth and spoke to Gareth which told me they had one in stock and he could ship it out that evening with next day delivery and hopefully it would arrive on Tuesday. I needed this to happen so we could fix the bike and have it ready for Wednesday as I wanted to go with the jeeps off-road.

So when we arrived at about 4pm local time my first question to Pam at the reception was if UPS had delivered a package and she smiled and I knew we were in luck.

After unpacking all the stuff from the bike we got set up to do the exchange of the slave cylinder.

 

We first needed to take out all the liquid from the hydraulic system so we used a Mighty Vac "gun" to take it out and used the Laxative Mineral Oil to clean up the system as we did not have enough of the Hydraulic Mineral Oil.

Then we removed the old cylinder which was taking out three screws. Two were pretty accessible but the third one could only be reached from the left side of the bike but could not be seen from there so I guided Rick as he felt his way to find the right place to unscrew. He also had one of these fancy tools that bend around corners and are able to unscrew.

When we took the slave cylinder out and looked at it we realized that this would have been most probably the cause of the problem. It looked rusty and full of debris.

 

We then had to clean the system and take out all the rust and then we put back the new part. Although not easy this part of the procedure turned out to be quite easy compared to what would come next.

Hydraulic systems like clutches and brakes on motorcycles depend on a strong hydraulic oil that has to be without any air as air is quite "weak" and when it is in the system it gives in and it does not pass force along and thus makes the system useless. The process of removing air from the system is called bleeding the system. The way you do it is you keep pouring liquid on top and pumping the lever in a certain way and you let the air escape from the bottom by opening up the bleeding valve. It is a very tedious process that can take hours if you do not have the right tools which we obviously did not have on the road. While there is air in the system the clutch (or brakes) lever feel totally different and is not as effective.

To make a very long story short we were able to get full pressure on the lever early on Wednesday morning about one hour before we were supposed to leave. We left the clutch lever engaged the whole night with the hope that air would bubble to the top and fluid would replace it.

And it worked ;-).

And so a saga for the last 4 days seemed to have come to an end. Doug had a great comment when he said that problems like these on the road help get us riders closer together and moments like these give opportunities for us to know more about each other as we spoke about many things as we all got our minds together to resolve this issue.

A special thanks goes to Rick Buttler for being the doctor in charge, for Joel Watson for being the remote specialist, for Gareth and Ryan at BMW Fort Worth for dropping everything and prioritizing shipping the part, for UPS for doing what they promise and for Doug Tobe for being there all the way as a great assistant.

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