20160828 - 54,250 Maintenance and Cost of Ownership

This service takes a requires some explanation.  My bike is consuming oil.  You can look at my other posts about that.  The dealerships I've spoken to all say that adding a half quart between oil changes is within normal specifications.  I did a service at 51,000 and used non-synthetic oil.  You can see the post about why here.  This service was to change back to synthetic and get back on the normal maintenance schedule.

I wanted to know exactly how much oil I am consuming so I could gauge whether the problem is getting worse or better.  When I did the last oil change, I added exactly 4.5l oil.  I ran the bike and did the oil change per the instructions in the rider manual.  That brought me to half way up on the dipstick...between the min and max marks.  Over the last 3k miles, I did not get a warning light indicating the need to add oil.  Again, wanting to know exactly how much oil I'm losing between oil changes, I ran the bike, let it cool a little and opened up the drain and sump.  I let the oil drain and drip all night long. I wanted to capture every drop.  I also dumped out the oil in the filter.  When my oil change was done, I measured it out.  I had 4350ml oil.  So, I'm consuming 150ml oil every 3k miles.  This indicates that the problem is probably not as bad as I thought it was...not that it isn't bad. During the warranty period, I was a bad BMW owner.  I never checked the oil.  I never knew that a 4.5l oil change only got you to mid way up on the dipstick.  I, being your typical American want bigger, better, faster and always the max.   When I got the first alert about the oil being low, I brought the level up to the max mark with 500ml oil.  I thought that was the amount I was consuming.  Still, I'm not happy with consuming 300ml every oil change.

Other news related to this came in yesterday when I posted "Dirty Little (Dealership) Secrets, Dirty Little Lies."  I plugged my blog on FaceBook's K1600 site and one of the readers indicated that he had a similar problem and indicated that on 2012 models and some 2013 models, the pistons weren't made right.  His BMW started smoking at 65k and he had to tear it down and replace 3/6.  Obviously, I'm now very concerned that I have a major repair coming and will need to be very careful about how far off the grid I take this bike.  I'm keep monitoring the oil situation and hope for the best.

As for cost of ownership, I'm at $0.61/mile.  Even if I do the piston replacement myself (above), should it be needed, I'm probably back to more than a dollar per mile to maintain this bike!

For reference, here's the 6k service checklist.  All these items were completed during this service.