Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Motometer instruments for the BMW R80GS motorcycle.....

Readers of my blog will know that I ran an instrument sales, repair and restoration business that specialised in motorcycles.....
I was strong on Smiths, but dealt with all the others....German VDO, Motometer, Veigel. 
From the USA Jones, Corbin, Stewart-Warner. 
Italian Veglia. 
Japanese Nippon Denso, Yazaki and Nippon Denso to name a few.
This blog is on the German Motometer instruments used on the offroad BMW R80GS....
Yes I owned one of these motorcycles and it is still around, being run by a friend, John Herrick in Sydney, to whom I sold it.
Left click on the images to enlarge....
I'll likely come back to other Motometer and VDO items in future blogs, for despite my closing my retail business I retain all the literature and I searched the world for it during the time I ran my shop.
I first visited Motometer around 1986, when I did a business trip from Australia via the USA ( where I visited the Jones instrument company) to the UK and Europe.
They were helpful with exploded parts diagrams and for some years sold me individual spare parts before reaching an agreement with BMW, Mercedes and VW not to supply further spare parts....
I sold off all the Motometer, VDO etc stuff when I closed my shop and other than this literature I have no parts...please don't ask- there just isn't any....
I note in a Wikipedia item, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motometer ,  that Robert Bosch GmbH acquired Motometer AG in 1991 and liquidated the company.
From memory it was around this time that I was unable to gain further parts supplies, so Bosch may have dictated the decision.
Motometer AG, Daimlerstrasse 6, 7250 Leonberg, Germany in 1986....now likely a Bosch factory....
1978 Motometer Catalogue cover page.....
BMW original equipment from the 1978 Motometer Catalogue.
1982 BMW R80GS off-road motorcycle.
 
1982 BMW R80GS instrument binnacle.

Motometer spare parts sheet for the BMW R80GS binnacle.
R80GS Motometer speedometer spare parts sheet.
Motometer top R80GS speedometer frame and main odometer parts sheet. This instrument is damped with silicon fluid.
Motometer R80GS trip reset spare parts sheet. The reset button fits into a rubber sleeve located in the speedometer glass.
Additional instruments in small "pods" were available as accessories. Usually they were a quartz type clock or a voltmeter both nominally 52mm diameter, but a 52mm diameter electronic tachometer was also offered.
Another view of the accessory quartz clock and voltmeter, but these are fitted to a BMW R65 motorcycle.
The dials were black background with green numeral printing as was the speedometer which was calibrated as a 180kph for metric areas ( Europe, Australia, NZ, Japan etc) and 120mph for imperial areas ( usually USA and UK).
The small, 52mm diameter, 8000rpm electronic accessory tachometer in a binnacle.
Motometer 52mm accessory quartz clock with binnacle exploded parts sheet.
Motometer 52mm accessory voltmeter.


As mentioned above, the dial configuration was a black background with green numerals with the pointer blades for speedometer,tachometer,clock and voltmeter coloured white...this was from 1978 onwards, prior to that, pre 1978, the dials were black background with white dial numerals and the speedometer/tachometer pointer blades were fluorescent red. 
The clock movement prior to 1978 was not a quartz movement, but an impulse type.
A quartz clock can easily be identified when running as the pointer for the secondhand advances a second at a time and appears jerky in operation, whereas the impulse clock sweep secondhand smoothly sweeps around in operation.
Detail of the speedcup shaft bottom pivot length. This wears on the end stone in the bush at the top of the mainshaft and the inside of the aluminium speedcup "poles" on the magnet, eventually destroying it.
You can lightly stone the worn end of the shaft and then tap it though the brass piece in the speedcup to the correct setting...0.140" protruding.
From DQs notebooks...electronic tacho calibration information.

Since I originally published this post I noted in the comments below about a fault with the instrument, which was the plastic threaded section of the lower instrument frame fracturing and that I utilised the diecast frame from the Motometer BMW/5 twin instrument.
The photo below shows it...
 

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