| Author | Message | ||
     No_rice |
so... long story short, on of my 9r's found its way to the gf's stable awhile ago. shes about 5'3" so after riding it for awhile and watching her tiptoe the whole time, i decided to start looking around for a low suspension. no sooner had i told her i was going to keep my eyes open for a trade then hammer bought an xb9sl. perfect, i knew he didnt "need" the low suspension. some swapping of parts later    and its an xbrl... and weve been talking about doing something with the bars since not long after that. she was always pretty stretched out to reach the bars and then put her back pack on or have her son riding on the back and it just added alot of weight for her to hold up. so... after coming across a set of xb9sl trees, cables and bars, i said are we going to ever do this or what?! finally got the go ahead! now to make all this crap work... and clear the fairing... hmm, that was going to be the difficult part. bracket for the ignition switch, easy. changing the cables, easy. changing the triple tree, yep, easy. not like i havent done this kind of stuff more times then i can remember. biggest pain was trying to figure out bars that would clear. the stock s bars obviously would have required alot of trimming of the fairing for them to work. so on a slow day at work i spent what seems like forever measuring things on the buells we still had and going over and over page after page of handlebars. trying to find something i thought would work, and wasnt going to cost an arm and a leg. finally ordered 2 different styles of dirt bike bars. one set was dang close but not close enough, and the other set juuuuust clears if you line everything up right. and i mean just. i had to trim about an 1/8" off the horn button because no matter how i kept lining things up i couldnt keep it from hitting the tank if it really did reach full left lock sometime, and id prefer nothing to contact even slightly so i dont have to worry about it after its painted. also had to cut about 1 1/8" off of each side of the bar. wanted them narrower anyway and on top of that it would tag the mirrors at full lock if it wasnt trimmed. i also want to figure out some kind of small fork clamp to put on it for another front brake line mount, but it works with a zip tie for now. it definatly improved the riding position for her. its weird for me to ride now. not used to sitting so upright, but it sure wheelies even better! plus it takes less effort to get the bike to lean over with the new wider bars. so anyway here are a few pics of the result        | ||
| Delta_one |
wow looks good. I wouldn't have thought that it would all clear like that, regardless of what you put on there. maybe with drag bars and those adjustable angle risers, but never would I have thought that dirt bike bars would work. that bike is going to have an identity crisis. | ||
| Buellboy492 |
I put moose racing dirt bike bars on my Blast. About $20, fit perfect, bend is close to "superbike" but maybe just a tad wider than needed... I could trim a 1/2" off each end but that would be like work. Love my dirtbike bars. Go streetfighter Go | ||
| Chippy |
nice job. | ||
| No_rice |
she seems pretty happy with it. now if we can ever get out for a decent ride together again soon... but yes it took alot of figuring and very small adjustments to make stuff clear. |
