It's winter time! Which means it's also time to throw money at the bike and get useless stuff for it!
First, and most useless change: I got a new
small motorcycle licence plate. These became available last year.
Old one for comparison:
As you can see, a good bit smaller. So small in fact that the licence plate holder now sticks out.
Cost: 12?
Next up, an
oil temperature gauge that replaces the dip stick. Since the frame serves as the oil tank on the XT, it's located right behind the steering fork - good for checking the readout on the go, then.
Sadly, it's covered by a piece of trim.
You can still sort-of see it through the slits, but it's not great. I might just cut a bit of the cover off so you can still see the gauge when it's put on.
Cost: 18? (was on sale from 30? I think)
I also found SW-motech
crashbars for my bike on sale at a store - 75? instead of 115?, so 40? less. Nice!
When I tried to install them, I ran into a bit of a problem though. The crash bars are one left half, and one right half. They're secured through three mounting points for the engine in the frame, with long screws and nuts that fix both sides at the same time. As I tried to mount them I found that one of the nuts that came with the bars
had no thread. Well, just get another one from somewhere else, right? Nooooope. They've used some very
special self-locking nuts. One of the screws was also too short - it had the right length according to the list of parts, but it was definitely too short. And since it's a bit of an awkward size (M10x130) finding one in a DIY store would've been a pain too.
Thankfully SW-Motech's customer support was really nice, and sent me the parts free of charge after I contacted them. It only took a bit longer because I first sent my request in the middle of december, and they had closed shop for the holidays.
Cost: 75?, on sale from 115?
I then used a 20%-off-one-item voucher from another place to get a
center stand, since I've become fed up with not having one and awkwardly fumbling around to do chain maintenance etc. And guess what, it's SW-Motech again!
The stand is mounted using the attaching point for a suspension lever.
Now, getting the old screw out and the new one in was a bit tricky. With the bike on the kickstand the screw was under tension, so you couldn't just pull it out. So I used a hydraulic lift to prop the bike up. However, when the rear wheel is completely unloaded, the screw is under tension in the other direction. :lol:
So I had to fiddle with the height of the jack to find the sweetspot where the lever's hole naturally aligns with the mounting point. Compared to the effort I needed to mount the springs it was a breeze though.
Another picture with the stand folded.
Cost: 112?, 20% off from 140?
And one final addition:
As it sits now (and the messy garage it resides in).