You're standing on these bikes when you're off pavement, so grabbing ups and downs is sweet. It works really well on the road too. It's a hotrod.
Printable View
You're standing on these bikes when you're off pavement, so grabbing ups and downs is sweet. It works really well on the road too. It's a hotrod.
We were on a week long adv trip and a buddy severely sprained his wrist. He rode on the back of my bike for 15 miles. He still talks about how awesome and smooth the quick shifter is. I'd add it to any bike if I could, past/present/future.
You're welcome to try it out in the spring.
I'm pleased to see you have 47K on it and are still happy with it. Has it given you any significant troubles?
I'm looking to sport-tourers for my next bike, and the 1290SDGT is enticing, but I can't get a good read on durability/longevity of that engine.
I haven't found anyone who has put over 100K on one.
PhilB
The highest mileage 1290 I've seem was a dude on advrider with ~75k miles on it, which is when he sold it. I don't think he ever had any engine troubles, just electrical stuff. I think there may be a couple in the 60k mile range that post occasionally.
I have seen higher mileage 1190's, some famous RTW rider with 120k miles posted a video or article where KTM engineers tore the engine down and found it to be in very good condition.
I have not had any major issues myself, thankfully. A leaking radiator (which took 4 years of mixed on/offroad riding to develop) is the biggest issue I've had thus far. Otherwise a few minor issues that were either easy to fix on my own (like a stuck fuel float, leaking fork seals, fuel shutoff that stripped out, rear ABS sensor intermittent failure, excess wheel runout, a few bolts that vibrated out) or fixed under recall (replacement fork cartridge, updated suspension firmware).
The bike has never failed to get me home, or in the case of the leaking fork seals, 1500 miles down to North Carolina leaking the whole way!
How many chains have you gone through? My Tiger 1200 will roll over to 50k on the Death Valley trip this weekend and the shaft-drive has certainly been convenient for my lazy ass. Not to mention I love the SSS. Also, how was the valve adjustment? I had 4 exhaust valves out of spec at 40k miles. I'm hoping to take the Tiger to 100k but always thinking what I might replace it with someday. The new V4 Multi with ~36k valve adjustments is impressive.
Oh, and I too want an up/down quick shifter. Totally unnecessary for street use but after sampling a few on track I am sold. It's actually interesting seeing newer riders buy bikes with quickshifters these days.
I'm on my 3rd chain right now. Each chain has lasted me 20k miles at which point they were at their stretch limit. I'm not obsessive about cleaning it, if I've been offroading every ride when I get back I just put it on the center stand do a quick 2 min brush and lube with the Dupont Chain Saver stuff. On road I'll typically go 500-1000 miles before doing the same.
Valve adjustment isn't too bad (you don't even have to drain the coolant), the biggest issue I had with it was me; it was the first time I had ever adjusted valves on a bike before. It's a typical shim-over-bucket style setup, the most difficult part of the whole thing is clearing everything out of the way. I've got enough experience tearing the bike down that I can take the tank and airbox off in about 15 minutes, but that was my first time getting to the heads. I think I could probably do it now in 20 minutes.
The most "fiddly" bit was trying to figure out how to reset the OEM tensioners. It's kind of a silly process involving compressing the tensioner against 2 washers of a specific thickness. Because I screwed that up the chain ended up skipping teeth when I turned the engine over by hand, so I had to re-time, which wasn't all that difficult once we figured out the crank angle of TDC of each cylinder. I also replaced the tensioners with manual tensioners; they're way easier and more reliable IMO (unfortunately Rally Raid doesn't sell them anymore).
The bike didn't actually need valve adjustment until I did it at 36k miles. IIRC I had to replace 3 intakes and 1 exhaust. Typically the exhausts don't move in this bike.
From what I've seen the biggest determining factor of how often you will need to adjust your valves on the 1290 LC8 is whether you've fixed the awful OEM airbox design. I can't speak for the SDR or DGT, but on the Super Adventure the airbox needs at minimum a UNI lid gasket off the showroom floor to prevent dirty air from getting sucked into the engine. The airbox is known to not make a perfect seal. The dealership added gasket maker to the "bridge" inside that separates the dirty from the clean side when they did my 18k mile valve check, and when I tore everything down at 24k miles some of that gasket material had been sucked away, so my engine was exposed to some dirty air briefly and there was a very light coating of very fine dust in places on the clean side of the airbox. I was pissed, but I added a UNI lid gasket at 24k miles and it's been spotless ever since. Luckily the exposure wasn't for very long, as the valves weren't out all that far.
They improved the airbox in 2018. I switched to oiled filter, and used some grease on the lid seal (There still isn't enough o-ring squeeze stock for my liking). After 12k, box was still spotless. Also added the KTM PP prefilters to the intake tubes.
The airbox itself actually hasn't changed since 2015. The part # from 2015-2020 hasn't changed at all.
They changed the filter retention brackets in 2015 for the Super Adventure (and 1190 models) which helped keep the air filter wedged in place better (it used to only be held at the top, which caused the bottom to get sucked away from the sealing surface).
The only thing that changed after 2015 was that in 2017 they added the water drain recesses to the intake tubes. Of course the 2017 models also had the better pre-filters, whereas the 2015-2016 had PowerPart "socks" that you could add (they actually surprisingly help quite a bit).