BMW Ejects Spark Plug, Causes Two-Up Calamity

By Bud Wilkinson

By the time the Sunday motorcycle adventure ended, and riding cohort Gary Randall’s 1968 BMW R50/2 was securely strapped on a trailer, the sun was setting in the Berkshires and a bovine chorus was serenading us from beyond a barbed wire fence. Something that I feared happening for years had finally come to pass – a breakdown in a rural area void of cell phone service.

Regular readers may recall that Gary collects old bikes, eight in all, including a 1946 Indian Chief and a 1970 Triumph Bonneville. The oldest is the 65-year-old Indian, while the newest is a 34-year-old, non-running 1977 Honda CB750 Four that has been parked in his heated basement for years.

I’ve written about him in the past – in spring 2010 when he crashed the Indian in Litchfield, sustaining major injuries and doing more than $14,000 in damage to the bike, and again this past June when the Chief refused to start when we went to leave from Indian Day in Springfield, Mass.

Gary loves the romance and the rustic handling of old bikes. “Having an old motorcycle is like having a child. They bring you great joy for the most part, but occasionally they really disappoint you,” he rationalized as we headed back to Massachusetts from Harwinton in his truck, a trailer in tow, to retrieve the BMW. But that’s putting the end of the story before the start…

The November day began with the simple plan of riding up Route 8, always exhilarating because of the twists and turns between New Boston and Otis, Mass., and going to the factory outlet stores in Lee, Mass. I needed some new knock-around shoes for dog walking and convinced Gary of the route. Needing storage space for any shoes that I might find, I backed my 1994 BMW R100RT with its hard saddlebags out of the garage.

The late-morning ride north was pleasant, if uneventful. Over coffee and sweets in the food court before commencing the shoe search, I half-asked, half-suggested to Gary that perhaps having one “modern” bike in his garage might be wise for trips outside of Litchfield County. It prompted a non-committal response and another bite of a sticky bun.

Being guys, who regard shopping as a target and acquire surgical strike, not a full day mission, we each found footwear within minutes and were back on our bikes heading toward Stockbridge. (Given the season and the location, had I thought about it, I would have sung “Alice’s Restaurant” to myself inside my helmet.) In Stockbridge, we headed south on Route 7, bearing left at Monument Mountain Regional High School on to Monument Valley Road to eventually get us to Route 23 and Route 57, a more picturesque way home.

It was just before New Marlborough on Route 57 that I looked in my rear-view mirror and Gary had disappeared. That’s not unusual because Gary rides his old bikes without turning his headlight on, making him difficult to see at times.  But this time he clearly wasn’t there. I did a u-turn and found him about a mile back. The bike was parked beside the road. He was standing alongside it holding a still-hot spark plug in his hand.

He explained that he was riding when he heard “a loud pop, followed by the pulsing of air on my leg. The piston was still going,” he said. The BMW has an incredibly smooth 494cc, 26-horsepower boxer engine with opposing cylinders, but the spark plug had suddenly ejected from the right cylinder.

Not seeing any threads on the spark plug, and not having much mechanical knowledge, I surmised that perhaps German ingenuity had devised a “snap in” spark plug. I clicked it back into place but it wobbled, so that obviously wasn’t the case. I then saw a tiny spring wedged in a gap in the cylinder head. Unable to pry it out from the top with a pen, I tried pushing a stick up from the bottom. The spring shot upwards and, yes, swished right into the hole where the spark plug would have been had I not removed it when it wobbled. Think Caroline Doty in one of her trick shot videos. End of repair work. What to do?

I’m 5’10” and weigh a tad more than 240 pounds. Gary tops six feet and weighs 250 pounds. That’s 500 pounds combined. Put that load on an R100RT and what you’ve got is a sluggish bike that doesn’t handle well, but we rode in comical fashion for the 40 or so miles to Gary’s house.  Yes, it was uncomfortable and nerve-wracking riding but thankfully Gary’s experience on two wheels made keeping the bike balanced and under control much easier than it could have been.

The sun was setting when we got back to the bike. He loaded it on to the trailer and I took pictures. Some nearby cows wandered down a sloping field as he secured the bike, mooing appreciatively as they looked on. We headed for home.

On Monday, I called expert BMW mechanic Don Garneau, who is a parts advisor at MAX BMW in Brookfield, to determine what happened. He explained that on older BMWs there’s a metal insert that goes into the cylinder head into which the spark plug screws. “They tend to do that sometimes,” he said of the spark plug on Gary’s R50/2 suddenly popping out. The tiny spring, he added, likely came from an after-market spark plug wire. Don estimated that it might cost a “few hundred dollars” to get the BMW back on the road.

Having often ridden with Gary this year and witnessed the breakdowns of his American (Indian), British (his BSA Lightning lost its shifter lever) and German (BMW) bikes, I have a suggestion for him: Get the Japanese-made Honda back on the road. And I’m going to put small bottles of antacid and ibuprofen in my riding jacket.

(Originally published in the “The Republican-American” on Nov. 26, 2011.)