R1200GS FD Seal (RHS) Oil Leak

The Final Drive RHS seal looks like it’s gone, and if a search on UKGSer.com is to be believed (and I suspect it is), this is a pretty common fault, happily one that can be fixed in about 30 minutes and for a few quids worth of parts.  Unhappily it also appears to sometimes to the forerunner to an imploding FD unit.

I’ve arranged to talk to the (non BMW) dealer tomorrow to see about replacing it under warranty.  The oil at least doesn’t stink or look black so that’s something that might be worse.  There’s no play in the rear wheel at the 3 to 9 position and only the usual sub 1mm play at 12 to 6 so hopefully that doesn’t mean impending doom, but I’d rather the dealer sorted it just in case.  Also as “some” oil has leaked out, how much does it need topping up?  No I don’t know either, which means draining the “sealed for life unit” and replacing the oil with the correct amount.  Not something that I fancy going for since it means all but removing the FD to drain the oil.  I’ll save that for next time when I expect my already limited warranty to be out.

Other than this the bike is great.  Effortless to ride, great to look at and otherwise in total A1 shape.  I think I might put off a tour of the local green lanes another week or so to see what happens with the seal.

Sometimes I like my chocolate 99% pure and other times I want it to be mostly vegetable fat, moo juice and nuts.

Today it was the later.  Hence the title of this post.  Oh, I guess you might not know what Cadbury’s Whole Nut is.  It’s a milk chocolate bar with whole nuts in it, only Cadbury in his wisdom used vegetable fat to make his chocolate instead of the by-product of various disgusting meat rendering processes.  Hence a hugely expensive and insanely dull fight with protectionist governments about it being not chocolate but “a chocolate like confectionery made from vegetable fats in a non standard manner, but yet not at all dissimilar to real chocolate in any way”.  Anyway I digress.  A bit.  Still it fills the space.

So I’m eating my whole nut and mostly enjoying it, except that there aren’t as many nuts at I remember.  It’s a factory process so whilst some variation is expected, over the whole bar, the nut based experience is supposed to be similar.  Yet today it isn’t as nice.  Oh the chocolate is good and there are nuts and they are whole, yet all in all the experience is less nutty than usual.   Are nuts more expensive?  Everything is more expensive, so hell yes.  More expensive than sugar, fat and coco beans?  I expect so.  Does that mean that some über arse in Cadbury’s marketing has decided that he must shaft me out of the full “whole” nut experience to maintain the price of his companies confection in the market?  That makes me a) bitter b) reject my nutty snack and c) wonder just what else is being thinned to maintain the price constant of something.

I mean are there less volts in my electricity?  Less actual tar in my tarmacadam?  Less politics in my politicians?  It doesn’t bear thinking about.  Except that less one.  I think there is more politician and less person.  Any-who it amounts to the same thing.  Some fecker has decided to think for me and give me less of something that I used to have, rather than admit to needing to charge me more for what I actually wanted.  If I want 8 nuts then I don’t want to be sold 7 nuts for the price of 7.  I want 8 fecking nuts.  Is that too much to ask?