The new goal was to ride north to Buenos Aires where we would ship the bikes and ourselves home. That afternoon trying to leave the island, we crossed the border out of Argentina when Mikey's KTM developed a death rattle and the low oil pressure light came on. Generally speaking, when these two things happen you've just blown up your motor. We began to brain storm on our options for this worst case scenario. To add to the complication, we were not quite in Chile, but out of Argentina. Given the seriousness of the situation, we made the decision to cross the border back into Argentina and get to a hotel on the other side where we could work on the bike. After 3 hours under the knife, we had determined that the problem had come from excessive clutch wear. The clutch material had clogged the oil filter and blocked oil flow to the engine. The death rattle was only the timing chain, as it is tensioned by oil pressure. We threw in some fresh car oil, left the filter out, and called it good. All it had to do was hold up for another 2000 miles.
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