I've thinking about this too since my finger tips and especially thumbs get cold even with winter gloves (not heated gloves) and heated grips. After breaking a factory grip in a tip over, I bought the Acerbis Multi-Concept hand guards. I broke one of these too (the aluminum part not the plastic), but I had to crash much harder. These are pretty tough gaurds and have taken lesser abuse with aplomb, so I replaced them with a new set.
These are mountable on the DL650, but they don't really fit right. Mine are angled a bit high, exposing my finger tips and thumbs. As an experiment, I mounted the left plastic on the right side. This covered the bottom side well but exposed the top. What I needed was both - left and right plastics on each side. Being the pack rat that I am, I had kept the old plastics because they were only scuffed, not broken. This gave me the opportunity to do what I had in mind - mount the left and right plastics on both sides.
To do this, I needed some longer machine screws that fit the threaded inserts. Also, the top mounted piece doesn't exactly stretch to fit, so had to elongate one of the holes in the plastic piece. An old soldering iron made that modification easy. With that being the only modification, the whole job was pretty easy - no fabrication skills required. I haven't ridden with them yet, but there are no clearance issues when turning the bars lock to lock.
Here are a few pictures to illustrate.
Standard guard on the throttle side, double guard on the clutch side.
The up-side-down guard goes under the right-side-up guard.
Close-up of the double guards mounted.
View from the back side.
All in all, it's a super clean installation. Who knows, maybe it'll solve the buffeting problem too! Oh wait, I don't have a buffeting problem
11-07-2009, 08:13 PM
Linear Mode
