BMW F650 Maintenance

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BMW F650 Maintenance DVDs

These DVDs show you how to perform BMW F650 maintenance yourself. They serve as a companion to a good service manual and solid wrenching skills.

Update: these DVDs can now be downloaded directly without using BitTorrent. See http://faq.f650.com/dvd/index.htm

DVD #1	DVD #2	DVD #3
valve adjustment lubricating swingarm and linkage bearings rear wheel removal tire changing brake pad renewal chain and sprocket renewal	dropping, splitting, and reassembling the motor lubricating GS steering head bearings^* ^*Funduro needs C Spanner instead of 12mm allen	front wheel removal replacing front wheel bearings replacing steering head bearings changing fork oil installing fork boots rebuilding water pump head removal & replacement valve removal

Maintenance Form

I use a form to keep track of everything I do to my bike. My form is specific to a carbureted F650 and will need to be tweaked for fuel injected models. I based it on David Braun's form on F650.com.

Common Problems

The F650 Funduro is a great bike, but there are common problems that need to be rectified if you are a new owner. The following items are known to fail at approximately 20K miles, so you should probably replace them if you are a new owner of a low mileage bike. See faq.f650.com.

steering head bearings
wheel bearings
spark plug caps
water pump
carburetor diaphragms
radiator fan (mine failed at 30K miles, replaced with Honda VFR 250 fan from eBay)

I have some personal wrenching tips on another page as well as some modifications I have made to my bike.

Old Bittorrent Instructions

The DVDs are legally distributed electronically at no charge via BitTorrent. You can also order them via traditional mail. For more information on BitTorrent, please see the Overview of BitTorrent.

The DVDs are in North American NTSC format, but most PAL DVD players can play both formats. Each DVD image is between 3 and 4GB in size.

Download and install a BitTorrent client. Examples include Vuze followed by utorrent.
Ensure you have at least 4GB of free disk space on your computer.
For faster downloading, open TCP port 6881 on your firewall. More on this later.
Click a DVD icon on this page and download the .torrent file.
If your browser does not automatically launch your BitTorrent client, double click the .torrent file you just downloaded.
BitTorrent will create a 4GB file to accommodate the DVD .iso image. The file size is not an indication of download progress because BitTorrent creates a file the size of the final image and downloads random chunks as it progresses.
Wait for the download to complete. This will take a really long time. It could take days or even a week depending on your Internet connection and other participating peers.
If your BitTorrent client cannot see any peers, then no one is currently seeding (sharing) the image. Post a message to the f650.com Modifications and Maintenance Forum requesting a "swarm". A good example of a subject line would be "Torrent: DVD #1 needed". This will prompt other people to offer their copy for upload. If you are having technical problems, please ask a question intelligently.
After the download is complete, you can burn the .iso image to DVD or mount the image and watch it on your PC if you know how. A detailed explanation for this step is beyond the scope of this document.

It is very important after a successful download to keep your BitTorrent client running. A good rule of thumb is to keep your client running afterwards for as long as it took you to download. BitTorrent fails as a distribution medium if no one shares. In order to share, you need to open TCP ports on your firewall (port 6881 is the BitTorrent standard and Azureus uses something in the 44000 range that changes with each release). Since there is an incredibly large number of software and hardware firewalls on the market, there is no way this document can show you how to do this. Remember: the person who makes distributing these DVDs successful is you!