Reality Versus Fantasy: Thoughts on Scramblers

By Greg Shamieh

Bad Ideas always result in the most entertaining stories. Really Bad Ideas are even better. So here’s mine.

I have a BMW R75/5 motorcycle that I have owned and ridden for forty years. Just like animate beings, the Toaster has evolved over time, having been a naked bike, an ’80s style sport tourer, and its current incarnation, a vintage style scrambler. On the gravel farm roads around my home, it’s as comfortable and capable as any motorcycle. Since I accidentally bought an adventure bike – I’m sure this has happened to you – I’ve been exploring adventure riding.  My BMW F800GS Adventure has been both a lot of fun, and an occasional source of not fun, including trying to pound me in like a tent peg in my own garage – rupturing my right bicep tendon and requiring surgery to repair in the process. The event put me in the mind that perhaps smaller, lighter, shorter motorcycles might be better suited to my preferences for off-macadam operation.

Nick Adams, a brother motorcycle writer-cum-YouTube personality, does quite a lot of gravel and forest service road riding, most of it on a 1972 Moto Guzzi Eldorado. The Guzzi makes a lovely thrum, and Nick’s deliberate, dramatic, British-tinged delivery makes watching him roll through the lake country of Quebec a poetic, almost hypnotic experience. Watching a video of one of Nick’s recent rides, as he was picking his way down a dirt dual track – one quite littered with chuckholes and puddles – he gave voice to a seemingly isolated observation.  Nick is prone to these unfiltered ‘as I sees ‘ems’ … they’re part of his videos’ appeal.

“I realized that much of my favorite riding seems to happen under thirty miles an hour.”

As I listened to this, I experienced a great flash of illumination. The Adventure Motorcycle fantasy is Dakar-rally flash; large displacement, neon-colored offroad battlewagons blasting across the desert at high rates of speed, shooting roostertails of soil and sand, and taking big air off the dunes. The Adventure Riding reality, though, is guys like Nick, who are actually enjoying the environment through which they ride, and not so concerned about speed, style, other people’s expectations, or much of anything else. And the more I think about it, I think I come down on the reality side. What a surprise.

Where this road leads me is that I really do not require a motorcycle with 11 inches of suspension travel, and a couple of hundred pounds of crash cage and expedition cases. I mean it’s cool and all, but it’s just an excessive solution to the requirements. If I was the sort of guy to do really technical offroad, I’d just buy one of the Honda CRF 300 variants, or a used 250 – and I might yet. But for dirt and gravel road travel, the motorcycle that got me here might still be the best tool in the arsenal. I’ve done the same stretches of dirt road back-to-back – switching from the old Toaster to the new GS – and I keep coming back thinking that I was more comfortable and felt more in control on the Toaster. There’s something wonderfully analog about its throttle response, and the mods to my engine – big bore kit with small valve heads and lightened flywheel – make it a hammer at low road speeds. One just knows what is happening at the contact patch and can easily do something about it.

I know that taking a 50-year-old motorcycle out far from home may present some unique challenges. And it’s ‘prolly not smart, so here’s what I’m thinking. The Slash 5 Scrambler is already fitted with Emgo vintage dirt bike ‘bars – complete with cross brace – and a set of Heidenau Scout dual-sport tires – so that stuff can stay. The oil pans from early R80GSs and R100GSs are a direct swap for a /5 oil pan. Those pans are tapped for four bolts that allow one to attach a skid plate.  The plate from the Paris/Dakar variants – which cover the headpipes as well – fits those mounting points.  So bashing soft engine underbits is no longer an issue. My /5 could probably use a new rear main seal, a clutch disk, and maybe a crankshaft thrust washer. An inspection of the final drive and the geared throttle linkage is ‘prolly not a bad idea either. This is routine work that is likely true of more than half of the old airheads still out there.

BMW used to sell wraparound crashbars, intended for authority motorcycles, for the cylinders from a supplier named Fehling – they protected both the upper and lower sides of both cylinders, and are dead easy to install. These are available, look good, and are reasonably priced. Givi, who made the whack-a-doodle Airflow dual level windshield for my GS, also makes a fairing that is designed to mount standard motorcycle ‘bars. That system works so well – including an upper shield that adjusts through about 6 inches of vertical adjustment – that purchasing another is a no-brainer. My Toaster already has a German police ¾ saddle – which was the saddle that BMW redeployed for the first GSs – so there is room behind the rider for a large cargo platform. A set of waterproof throwover bags – and there are many to choose from – saves about 70 pounds of weight compared with the full aluminum expedition case setup, with minimal reduction in capacity. I already had a drybag duffel for camping gear for the GS, and it will feel right at home there. I could see grabbing some hand guards, and will cop to being a puss for heated grips.

Which brings us to the ‘nice-but-maybe-not-exactly-necessary’ part of our tale. I still have a set of OEM ‘Zeppelin-style’ mufflers on the bike that I purchased new when I bought the bike – in 1984. They’re not designed for ground clearance, likely have enough internal corrosion that one good whack would return them to their component atoms.  A smart guy might replace them with modern aftermarket shorties.  A less smart guy might wait for the whack and deal with it then. Last on the list is the bike’s front end. While the stock long travel forks are beautiful, and work well, the original drum brake – while powerful and reliable – is not exactly the perfect tool for offroading, as modulation was never really part of the design brief; ask anyone who’s panic squeezed that front drum on wet pavement.  But nobody has figured out an efficient way to convert that front end to a modern disk. Someone has figured out a way to swap the entire front end – inverted forks, triple clamps, single disk brake, hub, rim and all – from an early 2000s Yamaha YZ450F, though.  Something with a bit more modern damping, and a brake that can be modulated does sound like just the ticket.  Not easy or turnkey, but definitely functionally superior.  We’ll see how my long-suffering Airhead mechanical genius feels about this part of the plan.  Maybe he’ll feel better if I can figure out how to fit the /5’s accordion-style fork boots.