Should you find that the rear caliper has to be removed to extract the wheel/tyre unit, remove the metal/rubber mounting between the exhaust and frame, and check the length of the pillars the bolts pass through. Mine were 22mm long and on checking my 1996 year K bike the pillar height was 15mm. This is still long enough for the rubber mounting not to hit the frame. The tyre now easily clears the caliper unit.

This shorter pillar part had been fitted from new on the K75RT.

PS - cut the bolts by a similar amount!

Hope this assists.

The narrow bracket is to be used together with the Z frames for the panniers,
and the wider one when you don't have Z frames mounted.

If you buy the Z frames as a complete set (with mounting hardware),
the narrow bracket is included.

Sorry not been available to reply- computer went on strike. Anyway my experience of this was that my first K75 RT had the narrow mounting and panniers - one PO no mods, my second was ex police, no history, no panniers, narrow mounting and my third is an Ultima. This has panniers from new but it has the wide mounting which does not allow wheel removal.
My thought is two of them are wrong but conversely why did BMW fit two different mountings? Space or aesthetics could not have been the problem, or was BMW just trying to make life difficult and give the dealer a way to extract more money for the easy job of changing a wheel? 
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Regards

George, do you have a picture or a part number of the part that you are talking about please?

bikerboy wrote:do you have a picture or a part number of the part that you are talking about please?

Wide bracket:     18 21 1 454 981
Narrow bracket: 18 21 1 454 982

Thanks for that. It does not look like anything on my bike.

4V models got a different exhaust bracket, which doesn't affect the Z-frame mounting.