Getting some ADV on. The KTM comes back for an upgrade.

While my KTM owning buddy was deployed, he had some time to kill. With all of his unused salary just gathering dust in his bank account, he did what most of us do. He went online to look for farkles for the bike that he only managed to get 56 miles on before he left. Since he really wants to get off road,  he decided to protect his investment with a sump guard and crash bars. Below we show some of the steps of the process.

Here I've started laying out the parts. The directions were multi page documents, but that is only because they came in eight different languages. The English set was only the front and back of a single page. Since we were going to be mounting both the sump guard and crash bars, we needed to find out if the two depended on each other for mounting hardware. We laid out the parts and the included hardware and went to work.

The new sump guard can be seen in the pic above. It is a nice 3/16" Aluminum piece with very nice welds joining the sections. Much better for protection than the plastic contraption it replaces which is to the right of the new one in the picture. After laying everything out, we started with the sump guard. The instructions were adequate, though the pictures were a bit hard to decipher since they were black and white and small. We got to a point where it was time to move onto the crash bars. Things got a bit complicated since there are 24 fasteners holding the 3 piece system together and onto the bike. There was a lot of fiddling and after two hours we called it a night. Everything is attached, but we need to go back and ensure that it is torqued to spec with Loctite in the correct spots and no binding between parts.

Here was the scene of my shop after closing down for the night. We managed to squeeze five fully operational bikes in the garage and still have (limited) room to move around. Due to our schedule differences we will take up this project in a day or two.

Update: We went back at two nights later. After a combined total of 5 hours of wrenching, cussing, more wrenching (including taking it all off and putting it back on again) we finally got it all together and buttoned up.

The last couple of pics show the final result. The crossbars in the top pic replace a couple of plastic panels to protect the lower end of the gas tank. They mount to the frame and to the engine block and seem good enough to do the job intended. They aren't that heavy even when compared to what they replaced. Putting everything on was an effort in figuring out the order of installation. The instructions said one thing, but doing it in real life needed a bit of reworking the order.

The sump guard really looks nice in the second pic. I like the KTM logo cut out. The biggest pain was the cross bar the the sump guard mounts to. It ties into the crash bars and seemed to be just a bit too narrow to get all of the parts in place without forcing something. In the end we figured it out and it all looks good. They will do the job and I expect my friend will put them to the test.

I deliver the KTM tomorrow which will free up some space in the garage. I'm going to do some work on the FZ1 in preps for a long trip in a week and a half so come back soon for more Motorbike content.

Blue