Is there ANY warning for the input shaft failure

[cageyar]

Google works-here it is:

Lubrication Engineers, Inc. - Welcome.

What's product number on the can?

[Slowgo]

Cageyar
product number 9102

[cageyar]

Here it is:

Lubrication Engineers - Syntemp^® Synthetic Lubricant (9102)

[EenyBear]

Hmmm.... thanks Ken.

[sgoodwin]

Sounds like it might be a good lube for chain drive bikes also.

[1100s nut]

Cage and slowgo thanks!!! I am going to call them. They probably do not want to sell a single can...but I`ll try. This is a perfect way to inject grease in a tight area like this. They should have solvent thinning agents in the grease along with the propane propelent in there and they will both flash off after insertion and grease will be thick again.

Lane

[Guest24]

Lane, you can buy one can and pass it around to all the NC 11S owners to use, please. It'll last forever.

[markjenn]

This is a bit of a religious subject, but I'm a believer that lube (or lack thereof) has very little to do with failure, so going to extraordinary measures to try and work lube in there is unlikely to make much difference. I base this mainly on the fact that there is almost no correlation between mileage and failure. A 20K bike has about the same chance of failure as a 100K bike.

Another pattern that has emerged is that when a bike fails, it has a MUCH higher chance of repeated failure. This points either to a usage (technique, abuse, environmental) factor and/or a issue of machining tolerances that are "baked into" the bike, particularly how the cases align.

And how long do you think lube in this area probably sticks around and actually lubricates the wear interface between the splines without anything to keep it on the wear surfaces? My bet is that it is squeezed out and basically gone within a couple thousand miles.

All this being said, there is nothing wrong with trying to lube, although I would never consider tearing down the bike to lube this area - the risk of screwing the thing up is just so much higher than the risk you're doing any good. If you can figure a way to get a little lube in there through the starter area, this might be worth doing. But I doubt it would do much good. MTBF is backed into the genes of the bike and for most bikes, the number is high enough it will not bite.

Just my opinion and there are a lot on this subject.

- Mark

[RBMann]

Originally Posted by markjenn

Another pattern that has emerged is that when a bike fails, it has a MUCH higher chance of repeated failure. This points either to a usage (technique, abuse, environmental) factor and/or a issue of machining tolerances that are "baked into" the bike, particularly how the cases align.


- Mark

+1

Also, I have a fear of spraying grease into the area of the clutch. What if overspray gets on the friction surface?

[bikerfish1100]

-1 Mark.
disagree. i have seen (via interweb) what appear to be 3 distinct "types" of clutch/spline faliures.
1) user based failure. these are the guys that just wear out clutches, thinking they actually ahve a friction zone to play with.
2) misalignment failure. this is the low mileage failure, followed by another low mile failure, followed by another, etc. due to casting issues, creating very slight misalignment between trans and motor.
3) lube failure. due either to insufficient/inapporpriate spline lube from factory (may occur as early as 40K, but most likely it shows up later than that), or from lack of "maintenance' lubrication along the way (easily inter-related). this is what killed mine, at 72K miles. Paul Glaves is a firm believer in lubing at 40-50,000 mile intervals. that's what got Voni's R11RS to over 360,000 miles, with no spline/clutch failure.

given these different conditional scenarios, it is easy to understand why some bikes' splines grenade at 20-30K (a misalignment destruction), while others make it to 70+K (lube destruction).
of course, all of this "conditional destruction" is theory on my part, based on a great deal of anecdotal "evidence" and interweb based reports of the spline failures.
however, i have never heard of anyone that follows a lubrication maintenance interval of 40k miles (with a correctly aligned trans/engine housing) having a spline failure. at all.

[markjenn]

Originally Posted by bikerfish1100

however, i have never heard of anyone that follows a lubrication maintenance interval of 40k miles (with a correctly aligned trans/engine housing) having a spline failure. at all.

Then you haven't been looking very hard. There are tons of bikes on the net with 150K+ without ever having a drop of spline lube and tons of bikes that have been religiously lubed that have failed. No one has any hard data, but I judge the failure pattern to be basically random with no correlation to time in service. The only thing that appears to be correlated is that if you've had one that failed, you're at much higher risk of another.

Again, believe what you want. But I'd never do extraordinary maintenance things (like rip it down for spline lube), based on the data we have. My final thought is that I'd never even consider owning an R-twin if a 40K teardown and spline lube was a necessary maintenance requirement.

- Mark

[1100s nut]

Mark, tons of bikes with 150k plus and no failure with no grease. Where is this data and how do you prove it with various owners. I think the grease helps with galding, chafing and corrision more that anything else. The voni glaves point sort of proves that this works. Not trying to pick a fight just my thoughts.

On the other hand people that pull the clutch in with a little power still on has to incur more wear as the movement on the splines is under a load as opposied to killing power and moving the clutch with no load on splines. I am one of these people.

Lane

[Lars]

Originally Posted by Steve Carlton

Just call me Lars. And yes, I do scare myself a bit.

Am I missing something? Is that a compliment or should I be hurt and sulking?

[Corky]

I had the failure and I'll tell U what I think. I think the lube deal or lack of is overated. If it makes you feel better then grease it.
But my bike always had this thrumming vibration in 4th gear at around 4,000 rpm. After Sierra BMW fixed it for me and balanced the assembly the bike was like a completely different animal. Night a freakin day. Smooth as silk and no vibrations what so ever.
On my 2004 I think BMW did a chitty job with the assembly and it was out of balance from the gitgo. Finally let go after 40K + miles.

That's my take.

[Guest24]

After Sierra BMW fixed it for me and balanced the assembly the bike was like a completely different animal.

Corky, could you please elaborate on this a little more? What exactly did they balance?

[bikerfish1100]

That sounds like a very atypical failure Corky. fwiw, my trans has always been a very smooth shifting unit ; not quite Ducatibutter, but nice. very nice. However; for the 1500 miles or so just prior to losing the splines, the bike played the occassional "no, i'm not gonna shift for you" game. release clutch, rev, try again. go.

[Corky]

Originally Posted by Nail24

Corky, could you please elaborate on this a little more? What exactly did they balance?

A misalignment throws the drive train out off balance?

Replacing the clutch, pressure plate the gear with the spline on it, and all associated bearings. Assembled by a competent mechanic, that's balancing to me. I wasn't there so I can't tell U exactly what they did.

Worked though........

[John Lyon]

Originally Posted by bikerfish1100

That sounds like a very atypical failure Corky. fwiw, my trans has always been a very smooth shifting unit ; not quite Ducatibutter, but nice. very nice. However; for the 1500 miles or so just prior to losing the splines, the bike played the occassional "no, i'm not gonna shift for you" game. release clutch, rev, try again. go.

Mine followed roughly the same pattern, although my hard downshifts went away for a while (before failure) after I changed transmission fluid to a different type. I also never felt any vibration.

[bikerfish1100]

Originally Posted by Corky

A misalignment throws the drive train out off balance?

Replacing the clutch, pressure plate the gear with the spline on it, and all associated bearings. Assembled by a competent mechanic, that's balancing to me. I wasn't there so I can't tell U exactly what they did.

Worked though........

that might be "balancing" to you, but to the rest of the world, that sounds just like a basic transmission input shaft & clutch assembly repair/replacement.

[markjenn]

Originally Posted by 1100s nut

Mark, tons of bikes with 150k plus and no failure with no grease. Where is this data and how do you prove it with various owners.

Where is YOUR data? Let's just leave it that I've been watching this issue for well over a decade now and there is no pattern I can tell. I have no interest in making a project of this and I doubt you do either so let's leave it at that.

- Mark