Oil reports over 4 yrs on my '03 R1150RT

[AnotherLee]

In case anybody's interested, oil reports on engine, transmission and final drive can be found here.

[greiffster]

Lee,

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

[roger 04 rt]

Interesting, thanks for posting it.

[dirtrider]

Afternoon Lee

 

I see a lot of iron in your final drive report (in fact that was noted in comments also).

 

It might mean nothing but could also indicate a loose pinion bearing (allowing pinion movement) or a loose crown bearing (allowing a little spool movement).

 

In most cases when the iron content goes up in the final drive it is coming from the pinion to ring gear mesh area.

 

That could be indicating a slight gear mesh-up mismatch.

 

The iron itself is not a lot so ring gear/pinion gear wear is not a concern (seldom if ever does a gear set fail in a BMW final drive)

 

The slight worry with finding iron in the gear oil is more of an indicator of (possible) pinion gear or ring gear working (moving) in relation to each other.

 

 

 

[AnotherLee]

DR - your comment about iron in the early final drive samples is interesting because a chip from a gear tooth was found on oil change 2/23/2012 at about 60,700 mi, reported here.

 

On the first FD oil change done 7/12/2011 at 48,900 mi, the oil was dark & cloudy with what I thought might be metal flakes in it. At that time I decided to wait, do a couple more oil changes and see what happened. The oil looked better on the next change but eventually we can see what happened.

 

Samples after that were on a used 5K-mi final drive from Beemer Boneyard and they looked much better.

 

 

The only other big failure was 8/29/2014, at about 98,400 mi, burned exhaust valves, reported here. Maybe I'm wrong but I wouldn't expect oil analysis to warn about that.