esa set up

[mendorider]

I have a question my dealer hasn't been able to answer. I am in the market for a 1200 gt and am new to the idea of esa. My question is are there starting settings for driver weight or has bmw used a average weight? To explain my weight is almost 300 lbs,another rider might weigh 150 lbs. Do I have to use the 2up setting or is there some way the bike adjust for the starting difference?

[®win]

I have a question my dealer hasn't been able to answer. I am in the market for a 1200 gt and am new to the idea of esa. My question is are there starting settings for driver weight or has bmw used a average weight? To explain my weight is almost 300 lbs,another rider might weigh 150 lbs. Do I have to use the 2up setting or is there some way the bike adjust for the starting difference?
No, no other way. The ESA knows 3 settings for spring preload: rider / rider + luggage / rider + passenger + luggage. For all three settings you can also adjust the dampning from comfort (soft) -> normal -> sport (hard).

[bonafidebob]

No, no other way. The ESA knows 3 settings for spring preload: rider / rider + luggage / rider + passenger + luggage. For all three settings you can also adjust the dampning from comfort (soft) -> normal -> sport (hard).
I wish I had a shop manual so I could see if there's any tuning possible with ESA. I'm 245lbs and I'm actually pretty comfortable with the ESA setup as is, no special tuning was done for me. I leave it in 1-up normal mode most of the time, and switch to sport for fun. I find comfort to be a little too bouncy for my taste and pretty much only use it on the crappiest roads.

Here's a thread from K-Bikes that goes into a lot more detail.ESA - How can it works correctly? (http://www.k-bikes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11296)

From BMW's own website, like the rider/+bags/2-up switch only changes the rear preload, while the comfort/normal/sport switch changes front rebound dampening and rear compression and rebound dampening. That's completely reasonable, and it's nice that the compression/rebound rates change together. The only thing you'd really adjust for rider weight is the rear preload -- and it does seem like it'd be really easy to add a manual adjust on top of the ESA system to tune it for the rider, I'd be surprised if the BMW engineers hadn't thought of that.

[grifscoots]

I wish I had a shop manual so I could see if there's any tuning possible with ESA. The RepRom is worthless as far as tuning the ESA, so you're not missing anything on that front. Now, taking it off the bike, yep.

[blankshot]

I'm 220 lbs and I find that 1+ luggage and normal is good. If on the highway for a long time I will go to comfort.

With the settings on 1 rider and normal or soft I find that on the bumpy on ramps, not that we have many here LOL, the rear will pack in on heavy acceleration.