BMW's Newest "Innovation" Is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair

You can make anything on anything. Doesn't make it smart tho.

If this were a production run of a few dozen super high grade aerospace donkey dicks with five shoulders and four pockets, an oil channel, a precisely engineered break point and a 12-step heat treat process I'd say yeah, make it on your Swiss lathe with live tooling or bajillion axis VMC or whatever.

But this looks to be a simple small, probably cosmetic or otherwise low-ish strength stainless or chromed fastener that BMW probably wants a few hundred thousand of. You'll be time, money, labor, frustration, managerial nitpicking, just about everything, ahead to just have the fastener industry and their existing expertise make it for you. The "bespoke" drive, the custom branding, those are all known-knowns to those guys. They'll whip up tooling for their screw machines and fill the same bucket in 1/20th of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJvQZko8uiU

Edit: replaced video link with better one. Obviously there's fiddle fucking around they're not showing and they're mix and matching footage of different products but the speed things move once you've got it all set up is broadly accurate. A whole bunch of these steps would be skipped or altered for a stainless fastener.

Unlike all the other guesses here, I actually do have experience with manufacturing specialty aerospace fasteners similar in size, shape, complexity, and precision as these. These are most assuredly being manufactured on a specialty tool called a “Swissing Lathe”, or Swiss CNC machine, because that is the machine you always use to make parts like this. It is a multi-headed turret mill combined with a lathe that can continuously feed a piece of long bar stock and continually spit out fasteners. They were invented many years ago to produce extremely high precision small screws for watches, and in fact Citizen is one of the main vendors of these tools to this day. Based on my experience I would expect the cycle time for making this part to be 30 seconds or so.

Here’s a good video that eli5’s the difference between a Swiss screw machine and conventional CNC.

https://youtu.be/y3y0tATB0lg?si=pkYDT3BV0-6C-aq5

And here’s a video with a high quality soundtrack that shows how the machine combines automatic lathe cuts, mill cuts, and thread rolling without changing machines, swapping cutters, or re-fixturing the work.

https://youtu.be/MPAK5I1HJAw?si=fnMmjDp6ydYSDbfH

And if you need some specialty fasteners made and have an unlimited budget I can reccomed these folks.

https://centrix-us.com/

I suppose that depends on your definition of “now”. BMW has had a 20 year history of fork lower failures on their adventure bikes. Just search “BMW Fork Failure” and you will find a lot of discussion. Here was a Microsoft friend’s wreck in Alaska, which I believe was one of the earliest ones. Front wheel complete separated while she was riding straight and level on a paved road.

https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/crash-in-destruction-bay-...

Reminds me of the 2-hole "snake eye" or "pig nose" screw heads you sometimes see in bathrooms or elevators. I have several of the bits for these since they come with every one of those n>20 -piece screwdriver bit sets, but I've never actually had to undo one. I guess that goes for most of the oddball bits those sets come with.

If they really wanted to screw (pun, sorry) with repairability (and at significant cost to themselves), I guess they could start making their own taps and dies for nonstandard threads you can't buy anywhere else. Wouldn't stop them from being unscrewed, though.

> Neither of these will survive in the longer term

German government will do everything possible to prevent these companies from failing, no matter how bad the situation gets. This means that current management can simply apply the "next quarter" strategy without any realistic downside.