A lot of guys complain about front end dive with the factory springs. There are two things you can do instead of to going to a heavier spring. The first is to try a heavier fork oil. The GS uses one leg for compression damping, the other for rebound. The brake caliper side houses the compression damping circuit, the other side does rebound damping. I put 15W in the compression side, 10W on the rebound. That's up from the factory recommended 5W and did make an improvement. Ultimately, I installed a Race Tech Gold Valve Cartridge Emulator and am using 15W in both legs. It's the best setup I've found so far.

With this set up, the front end is supple, with good small bump compliance. I've only managed to bottom it out once, and that was heading out of Saline Valley on a mud and sand road in the middle of a hell of a rain and wind storm. I was in kind of a hurry to get someplace warm and dry before the road washed out, and the extra speed helped get me through the usually dry arroyos. 'Cept the arroyos were now full of a foot of dark brown water that hid all manner of rocks and ruts. Going across one of these the fork bottomed out. It wasn't a harsh bang, and this isn't something I do all the time (in fact, I hope never to repeat that particular ride!). So I'm satisfied the fork is using all of its travel and the damping isn't so high that the ride is harsh.

All this was before I installed a large capacity fuel tank from the R80G/S Paris/Dakar. It holds almost nine gallons, and with that extra forty pounds of fuel aboard the factory fork springs were a bit too light. My first try at a remedy was to order up a set of Works Performance springs, which get a dual rate by using a short, soft spring on top of a longer, stiffer spring. They supply three lengths of spacers that fit inside the shorter springs, which themselves are capped top and bottom with steel washers. The idea here is that the amount that the soft spring is allowed to collapse before the longer spring is activated is changeable by swapping to a longer or shorter spacer. Since I was after as supple a ride as possible, I tried the shortest spacers. The Works springs also use a plastic spacer on top of the springs to achieve the proper overall length of the spring stack. With the recommended amount of pre-load (spacer length) I found the front end much too stiff and un compliant. I also started seeing a high speed weave in side winds or sweeping corners, something I'd never experienced with the BMW springs. So I started looking around for a better option.

David Paulus, a fellow denizen of the GS mailing list at Mica Peak, suggested giving the Wirth springs a try. They're available from Touratech for the usual outrageous price of about $120. As usual, when the springs arrived the only instructions were written in German, and the scan and

translate routine didn't provide much helpful information. As seen in the photo above, the Wirth springs are slightly shorter than the factory BMW spring with spacer. At the time, the Touratech-USA web site specified the use of a 5+ inch spacer over the spring! So I emailed a request for more information, and encountered the same run around as I'd previously gotten on other parts: They didn't know the answer, and would have to contact Touratech in Germany for help. In the mean time I emailed David and asked what he'd done. Turns out that no spacer is needed, and oil height is measured from the top of the collapsed fork to the top of the oil, and should measure 160 mm. A few days later the boys at Touratech got back to me and confirmed what David had said. And they've fixed the web site to eliminate the spacer reference. I proceeded with the install, electing to just swap the Works parts for the single Wirth spring on each side. I use the Race Tech Cartridge Eliminator, and with no spacers in use, there's no way to allow for the thickness of the Eliminator in the spring stack height, but that hasn't made a noticeable difference. The ride is firmer than the factory springs, but not so much as the Works springs. On a recent dirt road ride through some pretty nast /rocky/sandy washes I had no trouble with the forks bottoming out. And with a full tank of fuel the forks settle into the lower end of the top third of travel, right where they should be. I have noticed a high speed weave, but only when running Dunlop 606 tires which feature a very aggressive knobbie pattern. I attribute the trouble more to the tire than anything else, and with 1,000 miles on those tires, the threshold speed for the weave has increased by about ten miles per hour. It remains to be seen if the weave disappears all together with the reinstallation of Avon Gripster AM24 dual sport tires I usually run on the bike, but I'll know soon enough.