The Shed - Part One...

Now the choice of bike for our trip was not a simple one, with very limited funds, the need for reliability and ease of maintenance meant that most “state of the art” computer controlled gimmickry was out of the question. What we needed was a strong plodder that I could maintain, that was simple to use and would carry all of Sandra and my stuff with tent and accessories for a year.

We also needed to have a good support network, the ability to find a dealer in any part of the world so we could order bits should we need them.

Honda looked promising from a support point of view Honda are everywhere in the world, I also owned a couple of Honda dirt bikes and loved the build quality.

However nothing seemed to fit us….. So that ruled Honda out.

I wanted to stay away from modern BMW’s much too complex and much too expensive for us. However an older one might do the trick. After all there had a shaft drive and not the old fashion chain drive most motorcycles have, I was told by everyone that shaft drive is much more reliable and needed much less maintenance then those pesky dirty chain drives.

After much perusing over spec and reading stories of travellers we finally decided upon a BMW R1100GS, First build in 1994 or so and kept in production till around 1999 theses things had a reputation for the reliability we were looking for.

‘The shed’ (about the 20th R1100Gs we had seen) was bought from a rather odd farm near Hartlepool in the north east of England. It was twelve years old (1996 vintage) and of a dubious background. It was a bit of an old girl. It was cheap and with a bit of TLC, it would be fine…… I hope.

Having given it a quick service we had our first long trip on her. Our honeymoon, were we went down to Morocco and back. The Shed did a great job actually even though the clutch started to slip two days before we left.

Well, she did ok except that on the way home (some 300 miles from the French coast and the ferry), “the Shed” decided that the final drive (remember the GS has a shaft drive) had done enough work and promptly made it redundant by letting all the oil out of the seal and depositing it all over the rear tyre. This made the last 300 miles very interesting. Stopping to fill the drive up with oil and not being able to tilt the bike over on her right side due to a very slippery rear tyre.

Anyway we made it home. It costs £800 pounds for a new final drive; you can buy a lot of chain and sprockets for £800 so my faith in shaft drives is dented a bit.

On our return from our Honeymoon it was time to get serious and get the Shed into shape for the trip. Final drive replaced along with a new clutch (you have to completely dismantle the bike to fit a clutch) and replaced all the filters and oils.

Looking at our route I believed we needed to carry as much fuel as we could so I have fitted a much bigger fuel tank.

Panniers were going to be the next issue. The shed came with a set of plastic panniers which was fine for short trips but for one year…. Not a chance. Lots of companies sell so called “touring” metal panniers and I looked at them all. To be honest most of them where disappointing until we stumbled upon Vern and Project VND (http://www.projectvnd.com/).

Vern builds proper “round the world units” panniers the size of aircraft hangers. Vern also offers advice and help with them and is certainly one of life’s great characters. The panniers are tough and strong and will do the job beautifully.

However when you stick two people on a bike and fit monster panniers it’s advisable to strengthen the bike frame too, something else Vern also helped out with.

I will let you know how the bike is shaping up over the next couple of months.