Universal joint/driveshaft fail | BMW MOA


Thank you for posting. I was just reading this thread about an ’07 drive shaft failure at I think 50K miles:http://www.bmwlt.com/forums/rt-series/168202-drive-shaft-destroyed.html#post1741938

The entire shaft w/ both u-joints for RT LC:

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 12.49.37 PM.jpg

I haven’t heard of this kind of mileage yet on many ’14+ RTs but if yours is any indication whatsoever to have that fail at 73K miles starts making the case for routinely preemptively replacing it. Here are some other tales of woe on earlier model years:

“I was riding for about 45 miles in DC rush hour traffic and finally made it up to highway speeds. I was cruising along for about 10 miles at 85ish and the bike felt fine. I was listening to music through the scala and had ear plugs in, so I couldn’t hear the bike very well but all of a sudden is was very rough and getting worse quickly[​IMG]. Felt like a mechanical issue with the final drive so I pulled over immediately. When I got off the bike I noticed a burning smell and saw some smoke coming from the rubber joint where the drive shaft meets the transmission(?). I pulled the rubber back some and the inside of the swing arm was torn up from the joint rubbing against the metal. The bike is a 2007 R1200GS with just over 80k.”

“Same thing happened to me me coming back from a trip to Death Valley a couple months ago.
For me, it had done it’s damage and I needed both a driveshaft and a swingarm.
Burned the boot and everything. New parts totaled about $2600.”

“The front u-joint went on my 09 GSA at around 70k miles. I noticed it binding when I was doing a tire change and it felt like a warped rotor or dragging brake when I spun the rear wheel with the bike on the centerstand. I replaced it with new. Now I’ve got around 85k on the replacement and the rear u-joint is going. I sent the original shaft to Machine Service in Green Bay to have the joints replaced and am hoping to have it back next week. We’ll see how long that lasts.”

“Diddo. Bought my dream bike last summer (beautiful 2008 R1200GSA) with 40k on the clock and within 2 weeks and 800 miles, the front u-joint went. Being on a new bike, there is always the new feelings to get used to, but it started going bad quickly!”

“The forward U-joint on my ’08 12gs failed at 51K miles while going about 70 down the freeway. The rear wheel locked up and the forward boot caught on fire. Kind of exciting. When I brought it to the dealer I was told that they had seen the same thing three times in the last four months. They had the replacement parts in stock. I spoke with a BMW engineer and he said it was “not uncommon”. My bill was $2500 for the shaft, swing arm and two boots. Looking closely at the system and talking with the BMW engineers our guess was that the steel cap on the grease cup corroded and failed. That was likely due to water getting by the boot, either because the zip tie holding the boot on was not a sufficient seal or because of cracks in the boot. The water could have come from the multiple water crossings I did or by power washing to clean the bike after some off-road fun. My rear boot did have cracks in it. At a rally I chatted with about a dozen GS riders and when we checked their bikes we saw that nearly a third of their boots had cracks, something to check.”

I would love to hear the real prevalence of u-joint failures because it absolutely makes the case for preemptive replacement of the driveshaft w/ joints–sounds like if you let it fail you’re looking at a new swingarm as well which doubles the repair cost. Problem is, without good data on when these fail it’s hard to know when to cough up the preemptive replacement cost.

Leave a Reply