It's like any other profession -- a trained motorcycle repair technician need not have seen your FJR (or any FJR) in order to perform proper maintenance and repair. They have the requisite skills, the FSM -- there's no magic (it's just machinery and parts).
One of the benefits of dealership service (over independents) is their connection with the factory for current up-dates, etc.
(unless you're a trained mechanic? -- the factory service technician will, probably, perform superior work to that of the owner...)
You're welcome.
Ha! You are living in a fantasy world. Where I have taken my FJR is in the *real* world and what you wrote above is not my experience at all, across several makes of motorcycles.
Fantasy World v/s Real World
An Organized System (in operation for decades and supported by manufacturers) v/s Conspiracy Theories
I have to agree with SkooterG here, both on this, and his opinion of RideNow dealerships.
I have dealt with a ton of dealers (Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki & Ducati) over a long period of time (since I started riding in 1988) and maybe 15% of them could work on a bike they'd never seen w/o somehow damaging it. There's been tons of times I've had to help repair a friend's bike after a trip to the dealership. I've seen loose/stripped/missing expensive fasteners, damaged/mis-installed plastic, wrong fluid levels, wrong fluids in the wrong places, unbalanced tires, cut/damaged wires, disconnected electricals, missing brake pads, etc.
For God's sake, I've had them put tires on backwards. How the hell hard is THAT? That requires very little bike specific knowledge, and I consider mounting a tire a basic skill that any "Factory Trained Motorcycle Repair Technician" should know as a matter of course. Then of course they whip the tire off and remount it without rebalancing it. BTDT.
I've also seen dangerous stuff such as a brake pad change, where they put a caliper back on without one pad. That was a "I've got 30 min to do it, or it's my job if it takes longer" error and he was in too much of a hurry. That was a dealership where the service manager cracked the whip if you couldn't match the ridiculous factory repair time estimate.
As an example, I have 2 Yamaha dealerships in my area. One of them is crooked as well as incompetent, and the other is smooth, professional, and knowledgeable. Too bad the first is down the block, and the second is an hour across town.
IME, there's dealers that want bikes in/out as fast as possible and don't care about "done" vs. "done right", and there's dealers that realize customer satisfaction means return business and more profit. Unfortunately there's very few of the latter.
I've never been to an independent dealer, as I don't know any around here, so I can't say anything about them.
