vibration

Two popular adventure bikes. How do they compare?

I’ve had the Tiger for a full season now and a reader asked me to do a comparison of the two bikes, so here goes. I won’t say it’s like comparing apples and oranges because both of these bikes are peaches, but one is definitely older than the other, so the comparison is a little unfair. I didn’t sell the Beemer until the end of the season so had the rare opportunity to ride both bikes alternatingly, and the experience revealed their differences. This is how I see they line up.

Ergonomics

Looking at the two bikes above, you’d think the ergonomics would be quite similar. In fact, that is not the case. The first time I climbed on the Tiger for a test ride, I felt like I had to reach for the bars, and the dash seemed distant. This took some getting used to. There’s a lot more space around the triple clamp with the Tiger. Conversely, after riding the Tiger for while, when I climbed onto the BMW, the cockpit seemed cramped. This is really a preference thing; you get used to whatever your ride. But I would have liked a bit more room on the BMW. That tight triple-tree led to cracked plastics when the buckle of my tank bag got pinched between the centre panel and the fork tube when the bike was at full lock.

This sense of being a bit cramped was exacerbated by the height and design of the saddle. As I said in my original review, the OEM seat made me feel like I was sliding down into the tank, and while raising the seat when I did the Seat Concepts upgrade solved the sliding problem, I could have used a bit more leg room. On long days, I often found myself stretching out with my legs up on the Giant Loop Possibles Pouches I had strapped to the engine guards. The BMW is a great bike for someone who wants to get into adventure riding but doesn’t have long legs; it’s not the best for people like me, whom my mother nicknamed “Long Shanks.”

Power

The Tiger’s engine displacement is only 150 cc more than the BMW’s, but the triple cylinder engine puts out an extra 44 bhp, almost twice that of the BMW’s (94 bhp vs. 50 bhp). This is noticeable. You get used to what you ride, and the BMW, fully loaded, pulled Marilyn and me over The Rocky Mountains, so it’s got plenty of power for adventure touring. But I have to say, after riding the Tiger, the BMW seems a little, uh . . . gutless. Sorry BMW folks! You can have a spirited ride on the Beemer, for sure, and I’ve kept up with much bigger and faster bikes on it, but nothing replaces the thrill of torque. The BMW has 44 ft/lb of torque, whereas the Tiger delivers 58 ft/lb.

However, the BMW delivers reliable, linear power throughout its rpm and gear range and for that reason, it’s probably the better engine for off-roading. As I’ve written, the single cylinder engine hooks up both on acceleration and engine braking, providing a sort of mechanical traction control and ABS. (It has something to do with large gaps between the power strokes.) The Tiger, on the other hand, is an inline triple without even the T-crank of the new models that offsets the firing by 270 degrees. My 1st Gen model fires 120 degrees apart, so there’s constant power delivery to the rear wheel.

The Triumph Tiger is powered by a spirited 799cc inline triple.

Okay, another big difference, as you might expect when comparing a single with a triple. To be honest, the main reason I decided to upgrade was for a smoother ride. The BMW is as smooth as you get with a thumper, but upon returning from a 20,000 kilometre tour across Canada and back, I decided I wanted something that would be more comfortable, particularly at highway speeds. And I couldn’t have chosen a smoother bike than the 1st Gen Tiger (except for maybe a boxer, but didn’t want the weight). I’m glad it doesn’t have the T-crank. As I’ve been reading on user forums, why would you unbalance an engine primarily for the exhaust note? Yes, the T-crank has some of the properties like I mentioned above with regard to traction and braking, but those characteristics are better handled by electronic rider aids on today’s bikes. I love the high pitched whine of the silky smooth triple and would only go back to a single on a trail bike.

While I’m on this subject, when I was researching the upgrade, I considered the f800 GS, which would have been the natural upgrade from the 650. But isn’t a parallel twin just another single but with the piston cut in half? I don’t understand why manufacturers don’t make inline twins; it seems they would be smoother, especially if the firing was 180 degrees apart, making the pistons counterbalance each other. I read that even the f800 GS can be a little vibey at highway speeds, and since smooth power was my top priority, I went with the Tiger. The only vibration one can get apparently is from a little rotational movement after the third cylinder fires, but it’s nominal. I can see from using TuneECU that my throttle body is a little off, so I’ll be balancing it first thing in the spring and that should make an already smooth engine even smoother.

Electronics

Electronics? What electronics? Both bikes are from an era before ride by wire, rider modes, CAN bus, and rider aids. The Triumph, however, at least has ABS whereas its an option on the GS (mine did not), and it’s nice to have a fuel gauge instead of just a fuel lamp. (The BMW’s fuel light comes on when there is 4L left in the tank, good for about another 100K if you’re careful.) Both have robust stators that put out more than enough power to charge your phone and farkles. The BMW puts out 400W and the Tiger a whopping 645W. The display on the BMW is pretty bare bones—just lamps, dial instruments, and a clock. The Triumph has a little more: 2 trip meters that show live and trip fuel efficiency, estimated remaining mileage in the tank, and other data that may or may not be of interest to you. The interface is a bit clunky, or I’m getting old; an entire season with the bike and I still don’t feel comfortable navigating through it. Turning off the ABS requires several inputs, and unfortunately, converts back to ABS when the bike is keyed off.

Off-Roading

Both bikes are designed for “light off-roading,” according to their manufacturers. They both have a 17″ rear wheel but the BMW has a 19″ front to the Tiger’s 21.” I discovered the first time I strayed off the tarmac with the Tiger that this is a bigger deal than what you’d think. Those extra 2 inches make a big difference. I found myself rolling over obstacles on the trail that would have jolted the BMW and had me losing balance and momentum. The difference might be related to suspension as well. The forks on the BMW are pretty poor for off-roading, a weakness that couldn’t be corrected entirely by adding Ricor valves. The BMW has 41mm diameter forks and the Tiger 45mm. Again, that small difference in size is significant in performance. (That’s what she said.)

The Tiger has 45mm upside down telescopic forks with 220mm of travel.
Image source: ADVMoto

The smaller front wheel would lead you to think that the BMW would be better on the road than the Tiger, but I haven’t noticed much of a difference in how both bikes tip into corners. Despite the 21″ wheel, the Tiger is surprisingly good in the twisties. Perhaps that’s because it’s based on the sporty Street Triple Daytona but tuned and geared for off-roading. And while we’re talking about gearing, the Tiger has 6 to the BMW’s 5. The gearbox of the Tiger is silky compared to the clunky box of the BMW.

Fit and Finish

By this point, my BMW readers must be feeling annoyed. As I said, it’s a rather unfair comparison between bikes 7 years apart in age. But bear with me: there are some shortcomings to the Tiger. They are not, however, in the fit and finish. The Triumph is remarkably polished and refined in look and feel and has an excellent reputation for reliability, surprising given the British company’s reputation for unreliability in its old bikes. If Triumph couldn’t compete with the Japanese in manufacturing and quality control during the 1970s and early 80s, they certainly can now. In fact, they can compete with the Germans too. Triumph have developed a solid reputation in user forums for reliability, and while I can’t attest to that personally, the fit and finish of my Tiger is excellent, equal to the renown German-engineered BMW.

Balance

Yes, this is where the BMW shines. Putting the gas tank under the seat produces a very low centre of gravity. To my knowledge, there really aren’t better balanced bikes than the 650, 700, and 800 GS’s with the low gas tank, except for maybe the larger BMW boxers. The Tiger, by contrast, is a little top heavy, so I have to be careful moving it around by hand. (Thankfully, the top-heaviness disappears once you’re rolling.) The Tiger is also heavier overall—an extra 50 pounds (473 vs. 423 wet, respectively).

The other shortcoming of the Tiger is its tendency to stall from stopped. There was a problem with the fuel mapping of the earliest models, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how unforgiving the engine is off the line. This is a known issue that Triumph have tried to correct in its latest iteration of the bike (3rd Gen), with apparently limited success. I think it has something to do with the tiny pistons, but I’m not sure. At any rate, between the tall centre of gravity and the tendency to stall, I have to be more cognizant than ever of throttle and clutch control when riding, especially two-up.

And along the same lines, I’d say the BMW is more agile and maneuverable than the Triumph. I am more confident on it thus far than on the Triumph, although I’m hoping to get more confident once I do more slow-speed practice. Parking lots, tight spaces, single track—I can turn the BMW on a dime. It really is a very, very good bike for a beginner learning the basic skills of counter-balancing and clutch control, or someone maybe looking to downsize from a heavier bike.

Other Annoyances of the Tiger

Whoever at the Hinckley plant designed the side and centre stands should be fired. The side stand is so tall I have to be careful parking the bike; if the lot or driveway has a slight camber and the bike isn’t oriented accordingly, that can be enough for the bike to fall. Once I stopped at the side of a road to deal with a problem and as I stepped off the bike, it almost fell over. (Thankfully I caught it in time.) Another time I parked it okay, but I removed the left side case first, and before I could say “Bob’s your Uncle” the bike was on its side. I never had to think about this on the Beemer. In fact, it has quite a low side stand, and the bike listed quite a bit.

Similarly, compared to the BMW, it’s very difficult to get the Triumph onto the centre stand. I can’t have any cases on the back when I try, and if I do, I have to park the bike with enough aft-slope to help me pull the bike onto its stand. Even without the cases, if there’s a slight forward slope to the road or lot, it’s not going on. Both the side stand and centre stand heights are known frustrations for many owners, based on comments on user forums.

Conclusion

Overall, however, I’m very happy with the Tiger, as I was very happy with the GS. Which is better? It really depends on where you’re at in your riding and what kind of riding you want to do. The BMW was a great starter bike, but I kept it long after I was a beginner because it was a fun, reliable, capable bike. And the experience of riding a big thumper is unique; what I traded for smoothness was the raw, tactile, visceral sensation of the GS. Now that I’ve discovered the joy of long-distance adventure touring, the Tiger is the better bike for me. With its smooth and spirited engine, it’s going to be a blast touring on this bike, and as a pillion, the wife prefers the comforts of the Tiger, especially with the hard case as backrest. We’ll be taking this bike through the Maritimes, and then I’ll change the tires and do a solo trip down to the Outer Banks, including some off-roading on BDRs. As much as I love it now, I suspect I will truly bond with the bike during that planned US tour. Anyway, that’s my hope. Stay tuned.

As always, feel free to drop a comment below, especially if you have one of these bikes. In the meantime, my Canadian friends, we are less than two months away from the start of the new season. How are you keeping busy in the off season? Are you upgrading too, doing any mods? I’m always happy to hear from readers.

Two great midsize adventure bikes. You can’t go wrong with either.

coyote_vibrating

My bike is a single-cylinder, also known as “a thumper.” If you haven’t figured it out yet, that single piston fills a chamber 650 cc (652 to be exact) in size. There are pros and cons to a single-cylinder bike, but one downside is that, well . . . it thumps. But thumping is really a bit of a misnomer. The piston may thump at TDC (top dead centre) and BDC (bottom dead centre), despite its counter-weight, but at idle it gurgles, at 3,000 rpm is growls, and at 4,000-5,000, it buzzes. Thumpers are known to be a little buzzy in the handlebars.

Some are worse than others. I have it on good report that of all the single-cylinder bikes ever made, BMW’s Rotax engine is among the smoothest. (The KTM 640, by contrast, is known as The Paint Shaker.) But still, when I’m on the highway buzzing along at 100-120 km/hr, my throttle hand goes numb. It starts in the thumb and then travels into the other fingers, up the arm, splits at the shoulder, and disperses partly into my chest and downward (we won’t go there) and partly up into my cranium.

I imagine it like the Coyote when he’s flattened by a massive boulder then struck by the second falling rock or back-firing projectile he was aiming at the Roadrunner. In the cartoon, we see the wave of energy travel through his wafer-thin body. Only with me the wave is oscillating at 5000 rpm. The worst is when it moves into my nose and develops an itch deep inside my sinuses. It’s not like I can simply reach up and rub the bridge of my nose to dispel the itch, although that’s what I tried to do the first time this happened, only to be reminded that there’s this thing called a visor in the way. In a full-face helmet, your face is safely guarded inside its shell of carbon fibre and plastic from bugs, pavement, and probing fingers. Then I turn into Samantha on Bewitched, desperately issuing the anti-nose-itch spell over and over again.

Actually that’s not the worst. The worst is when it’s cold and my hand has another element making it go numb. Then I actually have to be careful because I need some feeling to operate the brake lever properly when needed. I know someone who was sitting cross-legged at a party once and whose leg went to sleep without him knowing and when he got up to go get another beer he fell over and broke his leg! Of course, he might have simply had too much to drink but these kinds of things do happen when the tactile sense goes AWOL. Maybe that’s in part why my bike has heated hand-grips.

After a 350K ride, which is what my club has been doing on its day trips, my entire body is vibrating in sympathy with the engine. We have become one, synching our bodies in a kind of energetic dance akin to the pogo. I step off the bike and it’s like stepping onto land again after being at sea or in a canoe for a week; there is the sensation that I am static and the earth is moving, although in fact it’s the opposite. My vision is blurred and my thoughts are fuzzy. I have to leave the bike and sit with a beer (preferably on my lawn lounge chair that has a cushion) while the sensation subsides. I’m not very communicative (although this is also because I’m exhausted) and I can’t make any major decisions, such as what we could make for dinner. I stretch out and, if possible, close my eyes. It’s a total body stone that lasts for hours.

By now you might be wondering what the advantages are. For one, because the cylinder is so big (as opposed to two or several smaller ones), more power is transferred to the wheel with each stroke, so the bike has a lot of torque through low and mid-range. Okay, so it has a sucky top end, but when you are off-roading, who wants to be riding at 100-120+ km/h? Only folks who race in the Dakar, that’s who, (which, incidentally, a version of my bike, appropriately named the Dakar, won two consecutive years in 1999 and 2000). Through gears 1-4 I have tons of power to climb hills, sand dunes, fallen trees, and out of Montreal potholes.

The other big advantage is that I don’t have to shift gears as much; there’s a broader range of speed through those middle gears with lots of overlap. I can start from stand-still in 2nd gear if I want to (or if I forget to gear all the way down at a light (doh!)), and if I’m in stop-and-go traffic, I can slowly roll on the throttle and ease out the clutch when traffic picks up again instead of having to gear down and back up. But where my bike really excels, I’m beginning to learn, is “the twisties”—the stretches of secondary highway that contain lots of twists and turns, preferably with hills, that every motorcyclist lives for.

I can see the other guys in my club working like mad to prevent their bikes from either over-revving or lugging as our speed varies through the straights and turns. But with my bike, I can pretty much stay in one gear, usually 3rd or 4th, and simply roll off the throttle into the turn, then roll it back on with a growl on the way out. My dad calls it a “true European touring bike.” Yeah, the Honda Gold Wing might have been designed for the super slabs of North America, but my bike was built for twisting highways that cut through the Bavarian forest. And when I do get my full licence and start touring, you can bet I will be going on the straight-and-boring only as much as necessary. There are now motorcycle GPSs that have a setting to take you on Twisties, and you can be sure I’ll have my GPS set for that.

In the meantime, I’ve installed something called Grip Buddies (clearly a knock-off of Grip Puppies out of the UK). They are neoprene sleeves that wrap around the handle-grips and help alleviate the vibration, I think. This will help me on those sections of our club trips when we are forced to take the highway to get to where the ride really starts.

I’m also learning to enjoy the buzz.

650thumper

Life is an Adventure