Hooray, I have Beemer again!

So, while diagnosing the intake manifold problem, I discovered that my throttle cable was frayed. Apparently this is a common problem with the F650GS as Die Korporation picked a stupid, sharp-angled, way to route the cable under the airbox.

Anyway, I bought a new throttle cable at Cal BMW when I picked up the new intake manifold.

Unfortunately, Die Korp, in its infinite wisdom, produced two lengths of throttle cables for the F650GS, depending on year, and naturally I wound up with the wrong length. This, of course, begs the question of why the parts guy didn’t look up my model year on the schematic, but I digress.

Hint: with a throttle cable installed and the throttle closed, you don’t want your throttle body to look like this:

At least I figured it out with a very minimum amount of head-scratching as to why the bike was suddenly idling at 4000 RPM.

So yesterday I went back to Cal and got a new, correct, throttle cable. Funny how much better that works!

It only took almost three weeks, but I finally have the Beemer happy again. Yay!

Unfortunately, three weeks of riding the XTs have spoiled me with their perfect-for-short-arms posture and my hands are killing me today.

I think the root cause might be that the bar risers on the F650GS may be about 1/2″ too tall for my shrimpy arms. I may bring the bar risers into TechShop over the weekend and use the mill to take a little off the top, as it were.