1986 K75C w/ Luftmeister Turbo

 

(I need to get a better picture of it. Probably in July, the next time the sun comes out in Seattle.)

I was talking to a friend in SoCal about some other K bike stuff when he mentioned the he'd seen a turbo K bike on Craig's List for a low price.  I looked it up while we were talking and, with about 115K miles on it, it was up for sale for $1,500.  Figuring it was the only chance I'd get to own a turbo brick, I jumped on it and closed the long distance deal in a couple of days.  My friend picked it up and stored it for me for a few weeks until I was able to arrange shipping to Seattle.

When it arrived at my house in Seattle, it had a few things wrongs with it that I'd already noticed in the Craig's List pictures, like a bent brake lever and busted right mirror from being dropped, but on the whole it was in very good cosmetic condition. As I'd expected from the mileage, it needed a lot of TLC and new rubber parts to get it back into good riding shape but it was an excellent project bike.  Aside from coming with near new city cases and a fairly recent frame paint job, the best part was that when I tore into it I discovered that the turbo itself was still in very good condition.

After lots of renovation and upgrading of it, it turned out to be a great buy as far as I'm concerned. Whereas the torque on a stock K75 flattens out at about 7,000 RPM, on this K75 the turbo kicks in around 6,000 RPM and makes it FLY up to 8,000 RPM and beyond. As an unexpected bonus, it also has modified intake and exhaust cams that yield a noticeable performance improvement down in the lower RPM ranges.

Since I already have a K75 with a K1100RS fairing and to keep this bike light and fast, I decided to leave the C fairing on it. I converted the final drive to a 32:11 paralever with a Works Performance shock, upgraded the forks to the later sport "S" forks with Progressive springs and swapped in some three spoke wheels with radial tires for better handling and performance as well as converting the rear drum brake to a disc. I also upgraded the braking, had the engine side covers done in Chromex ceramic coating and added a ton of custom LED/HID lighting to it.

Back in the 80s and 90s. there was a company named Luftmeister in the LA area that specialized in performance and styling mods for BMWs. One of the things they did was turbocharge K100s and K75s. I've heard that they turbocharged a total of around 100 K100s.  If a K bike owner were spending all of the money to do this then they might as well do it to a four cylinder K100 so I don't think Luftmeister turbocharged many K75s, making this a rather rare K75. 

Here's some Luftmeister catalog pages about the turbo and cams from around 1990:

 

Here's some more pictures of it from my first ride after finishing the renovation and upgrades: