About this library

This is Robert “Snowbum” Fleischer’s technical writing, reorganized for club members. His words are unchanged. Everything else on these pages was added by the club.

Whose work this is

Robert Fleischer wrote and maintained bmwmotorcycletech.info from 1999 until his death, revising it continuously — the newest revision dates in this corpus run to September 2024. He arranged during his lifetime for the Vintage BMW Motorcycle Owners club to host the site and to own it afterwards, writing on his own Technical Articles List page that the club “will continue to host my site after my death.” That arrangement is the authority under which this library exists.

The two things the club now keeps

What the club added — and what it did not

The editorial standard for this project has one rule at its centre: no sentence of Snowbum’s technical prose is rewritten, shortened, re-ordered or summarized. His corpus states 3,387 specifications — torque values, valve clearances, jetting, oil capacities, winding resistances — almost all of them inside ordinary sentences, hedged with the conditions that make them correct. A paraphrase that turns 25 ft-lb into 29–31 ft-lb damages an engine. So the text is copied verbatim and the accuracy is guaranteed by construction.

What was added:

• A real information architecture. Snowbum filed his numbered articles into four buckets, one of which is called “Mechanical? Electrical? BOTH? ……NEITHER?”. They are now in 15 sections that follow the motorcycle.
• Recovery of the unlisted articles. 53 substantial technical articles were reachable only from his home page or from links buried inside other articles — they never appeared on the Technical Articles List at all. They are now indexed like everything else.
• Model applicability. Every article was read for the machines it discusses, so a member can start from their own motorcycle.
• A specification index. Every stated value is gathered in one place and linked back to the sentence that qualifies it.
• Working cross-references. He wrote “see article 15-B” hundreds of times; those are now links.
• Full-text search over 1,192,907 words, and the 530 diagrams and photographs placed back beside the paragraphs that explain them.

How the archive was made

The complete site was mirrored non-destructively: 212 HTML pages and 1011 referenced binaries (diagrams, scanned factory material and PDF manuals), 118 MB in total. The archived files are byte-for-byte as served and are never written to. Every page in this library is generated from that archive, so the reorganization can be re-run, corrected or reversed at any time without touching the source.

Known gaps

• Five links on the original site are broken at source — four are malformed URLs containing spaces, and dirtylaundry.htm was removed by Snowbum himself, who linked to an Internet Archive copy in its place. These are recorded, not repaired.
• Article numbers 54, 60 and 80 do not exist. 80 is marked “empty on purpose” in his own list; 54 and 60 appear to have been retired. Nothing is missing.
• Model tags are derived from what each article discusses and are a starting point, not a warranty of applicability.
• His personal, biographical and photo-gallery pages are archived for posterity but are deliberately excluded from the technical library.

Rights

Snowbum’s copyright notice grants readers use of his pages and permits reorganization provided the work is not passed off as someone else’s and any modification is made plain. This library complies by the strictest available reading: his text is unmodified, he is named as the author on every page, and every article links to the original. The club claims authorship only of the structure, the indexes and this software.