New member with a brick!

[speedy]

Hi everyone, I'm from Toledo, Ohio.  Just picked this up a couple days ago from a guy up in Michigan.  It's got 59k on it, and I love it.  I'm sure I'll have all kinds of questions to ask in the not too distant future.

So far I just gave it a good cleanup and made some minor adjustments.  Just had a fresh service from the PO.  Now it just needs a little bit of touch paint, and it will look even better!

[frankenduck]

Nice bike.  Welcome to the Klub. 8)

[WayneDW]

Hello.  Enjoy your new ride!

[Lawrence]

We may be going up the steep part of the learning curve at the same time.  I plan to pick up my 1985 K100RS this Saturday.  I'll ride it to a friend's place near the seller, clean it up and familiarize myself with the controls then head for home -- about 800 miles away!  Should be a very "interesting" weekend.

[frankenduck]

familiarize myself with the controls

http://www.motobrick.com/index.php?topic=370.0

[Lawrence]

I got home safely with my new-to-me K100RS.  True to their reputation, the speedo/odo is non-working or working intermittently.  What with the goofy warning lights for 7 and 4 liters of fuel, my first order of priority is to fix the speedo/odo so I don't run out of gas.
I really don't understand the thinking of the designers here.  What was wrong with fuel taps with reserve positions?  Fuel gauges invariably are inaccurate on motorcycles.  Knowing you have X amount of fuel remaining after you turn the tap to reserve is simple and pretty much foolproof.  It seems like these goofy warning lights are a (bad) fix for a problem that never existed. Okay, end of rant.
I'm very familiar with the issues that Motometer clocks fitted on Airheads have and I can repair them.  Are the K-bike speedo/odo instruments essentially the same? Is the intermittent functioning the result of a gear slipping on a shaft in the assembly?  I was thumbing thru the Haynes service manual last night and I noticed the speedo signal is apparently taken from the reardrive on the K100RS and the sending unit must be periodically cleaned.  Huh?  The airheads have a mechanical drive from the transmission; do K-bikes have an electronic speedo/odo?

[frankenduck]

Speedo: inductive pulses.  There usually isn't too much to clean off of it.


Fix a flaky or inoperative K bike speedometer


K bike fuel gauges and the idiot light work very reliably.  I much prefer it over a petcock.  I've only run out of gas once in maybe 200k of riding K bikes.  I was pushing it on an Iron Butt ride and came up about two miles short.

[Lawrence]

Thanks for the link to the speedo debug thread. I'll get on that right away.
As for the fuel indicator lights, I guess I just bought a bag of worms with mine.  On my way home yesterday I topped off and returned to the interstate. Both the 4 and 7 liter lights immediately began to blink alternatively for miles. They calmed down after I burned through about a gallon of gas. Earlier that same day I ran the bike down to the 4 liter light and, not knowing how far I'd traveled due to the inoperative odo, I stopped for fuel.  Managed to get a little over 2.5 gallons in the tank !?!
I spend a good part of the afternoon cleaning the new-to-me 1985 K100RS up.  She's very nice looking - from about 20 feet back LOL!  The paint polished up very well, but the alloy is gonna take some time and elbow grease.
This forum is invaluable to me.  I've a lot to learn and this will make it less painful. I never cared much for the school of hard knocks. Thanks a bunch.

[billday]

The yellow 7 liter light on my '85 k100 likes to light up as I roll out of the gas station,  I guess to remind me that I will be buying gas again in the future! I think it is more likely to light up prematurely in hot weather.

The red light is more useful, when it lights up a fuel stop really is in my near future. It's sensitive to the gas sloshing around, so when it stays on even after hard-ish braking, I know I really need to thinking about getting gas.

What I rely on most is my trip odo, which is a new replacement unit bought from Max BMW. Nearly $100 but worth it to me. Not difficult to install if you take your time and study how the instrument cluster is put together.

As others have said elsewhere, it's not good practice to run the tank super low, because the fuel filter is lubricated by the gas it's immersed in.