All Dressed Up With Someplace To Go
All Dressed Up With Someplace To Go
BMW's Touring Accessories Package Is Hard to Beat
What are the needs of the Magellan-minded tourer? Granitic reliability, for openers. Comfort that will measure up against thousand-mile days. Handling that will make the thousand-mile day fun. Luggage that's simultaneously handy and secure. And a fairing to push aside the chilly winds.
When we uncrated a brand new R100S (touring edition) a couple months back, we scrutinized BMW's concept of the reliability, comfort and handling parameters, but time and space prevented us from passing along our review of the luggage and fairing portions of the package. We picked up a BMW tank bag at the uncrating, but the fairing, by Luftmeister, and luggage, manufactured for BMW by Krauser, found their w'ay onto the bike about 750 miles into our experience with it. This gave us an opportunity to run our test programs on an
unfettered bike, our usual practice, plus we got a good idea of what it would be like to tour the bike sans fairing.
Predictably, the results of our before -and-after survey yielded a unanimous vote for touring with the fairing in place. Even though the riding position on a BMW seems to help minimize wind resistance, a fairing—almost any fairing—eliminates it entirely. Of course, the Luftmeister isn't just any fairing. The Luftmeister is fashioned from hand laid-up fiberglass, in contrast to some less expensive fairings formed from injection-molded plastics. Although neither plastics nor fiberglass are completely impact-proof, the layers of glass are less likely to shatter if the bike goes down and will resist vibration-induced surface cracking longer, thus preserving the finish. The quality of the latter is high indeed, with careful attention to detail and a chrome molding to protect the padded, reinforced edges.
As the photos show, the fairing has provisions for instrument mounting—voltmeter and quartz clock—but on the new RIOOS touring model these two instruments are part of the basic package and are mounted athwart the speedo and tach. This leaves a couple of blanks, which would be handy spots for additional instrumentation, say oil pressure and oil temp gauges.
Between the blanks is a handy little knob for adjusting the quartz-halogen headlamp height to the bike's load. The fairing has the usual useful storage pockets and also features its own wiring harness, which saves a lot of fumbling around with needle-nosed pliers and shrink tubing during installation.
The fairing fastens to the bike with a straightforward frame mounting. The lower mounts ride on rubber grommets that cushion the downtubes. Ordinary hose clamps secure the union. The installation would look neater if the clamps were flat black instead of stainless, however, everything is solid and we detected no rattles. A resonant vibration showed up at low rpm in the lower gears, but we'd also noticed the same noise coming from the gas tank at the same engine speeds and regard it as a characteristic of this bike in particular. It's one of those noises you stop noticing after a short period of living with a bike.
The functionality of these accessories is so strong that we feel certain cosmetics were only a secondary consideration. But you'd never know it to look at the bike. Everything looks right, viewed from the front, the side, or, as occurs often enough on the high road, going away. The sight of a full-dress Beemer sailing past obviously bound for somewhere far away always stirs something in the soul of other riders. Unlike some other machines, these bikes look complete—as opposed to cluttered—in full touring regalia.
As far as its actual performance goes, the Luftmeister drew good marks from all hands and seems to be directly comparable to Vetter's Windjammer. Some buffeting from crosswinds and truck bow waves was reported, which is normal, and one rider found himself looking at the upper edge of the windscreen more than he wanted to, but generally the Luftmeister shields the rider from the icy blasts without creating any breeze in the small of the back, a failing of some fairings we've encountered. We can't give you a solid reading on what the fairing does to fuel economy because the RIOOS kept getting progressively better mileage as it loosened up, fairing notwithstanding. Our test riders were returning 47 and 48 mpg figures when the bike went back to Butler and Smith, some 2000 miles on the clock. In our full road test, the bike was getting only 39.3 mpg.
Touring fairings inevitably alter a motorcycle's handling qualities, but the Luftmeister is easy to get used to. It's light—the whole package, with mounting hardware, is just over 28 lb.—and consequently free of top-heaviness. Although the bike can't be> flopped back and forth in corners as readily as it can au natural, this activity is presumably not a high priority one with long distance riders.
Being in cahoots with BMW gives Luftmeister a distinct advantage over other fairing manufacturers in that Luftmeister is able to supply its products in official BMW colors. The red smoke color of the Luftmeister was an exact match for the red smoke of our RIOOS, and the quality of the finish was first rate. Another big advantage, of course, is that you can get all these goodies through—and installed by—your BMW dealer.
The luggage—it's made by Krauser but BMW prefers to call it BMW—is hardly new to touring riders. It's light in weight (approx. 25 lb. including mounting brackets), it's trim in appearance, it's reasonably secure thanks to locks that are more than tissue paper, its pebble grain finish and general durability help in resisting scuffs and dents, and its snap-off and carry away feature make it supremely easy to use. These bags have become the model for a whole generation of motorcycle touring luggage.
Capacity is good. The bags had more than enough room for an excursion up the California middle coast, even though our traveling companion was a lady who is unable to set foot outside the house without her hair curler, hair dryer, four varieties of nail polish, several complete changes of clothes, backgammon set, etc. There's room enough inside either bag for a helmet. For most of us the capacity of these bags, augmented by the auxiliary storage of the fairing, would be sufficient for a journey of almost any length, provided one packed judiciously.
However, if you want to bring along a few little civilizing extras, there's the tank bag. Set up with two levels and a pop-up top, this bag will swallow a surprising quantity of stuff as it swells vertically. Constructed of vinyl with leather straps and fitments, the bag has the appearance of quality goods. It's padded underneath with foam to keep it from scratching the tank and includes a transparent map case on top with a plastic rain hood tucked away inside. Removal, for gas and overnight stops, is simple.
As is the case with most BMW offerings, these items don't come cheap. The fairing ranges from $260 to $307, depending on color (red smoke being the most expensive). The luggage is $268 and the tank bag $73. But you're not likely to have to duplicate any of these expenditures very soon
