hey everybody how’s it going I am coming to you from my garage with my 2013 suzuki v-strom 650 and I wanted to make a short little video detailing some of my inexpensive and or handmade mods now motorcycling is not necessarily an inexpensive hobby and I’ve certainly spent my fair share of my hard-earned paycheck on pricey and otherwise not so budget-friendly modifications and that goes for other motorcycle that I’ve got to so multiply that by two again not a cheap hobby so it’s nice to have a few things on my bike that didn’t cost me a whole lot of money because either I’ve repurposed items that were meant for something else or I made motorcycle fairings my own things and so I wanted to just kind of go over a few of those things that I’ve done to this bike which some of the stuff can be applied to the earlier first-generation v-strom 650 but I’m going to focus primarily on the current 2012 to 2015 650 v-strom so starting kind of at the front and top I’ve got the Suzuki OM plastic hand guards now there’s nothing you know that fancy about these they’re just molded plastic nothing really structural because there’s no metal framing like what you get with bark Buster’s and the like and that’s okay I just want to jump for some additional wind protection as well as to help guard from flying debris bugs rocks whatever from hitting my hands going down the road one thing I found during colder months is that without heated grips which something I do want to add to this bike eventually
my thumbs in particular just because that’s what’s hanging down the lowest underneath the grip tends to get pretty cold and you know longer rides colder days you go pretty numb and so this is something that I thought about making when I had my 2006 v-strom just never got around to it and decide to make a set for this bike now you’ll see that I’ve got some holes that are drilled and in the hand guards around the perimeter of the bottom and that’s where I’ve mounted these little plastic extensions now come over here to my fancy little table here and you’ll see what I’ve done this is basically just a Rubbermaid trash can that I’ve cut sections out of and used one of these Harbor Freight heat guns to kind of mold and bend the plastic and that way it fits nicely and get this a lot flip kick down that helps deflect the away from my thumb because again that’s what gets the coldest and then just some stainless steel hardware at Home Depot that I picked up to mount everything and more or less just made a paper template like that this is actually not the template for this particular handguard I made that template for 2008 zx6r fairings the earlier model Vee Strong’s that my dad still has so he could have a set of them too but anyway so come over here and I’ll show you what it looks like mounted up and pretty clean insulation doesn’t look too bad I mean you get the hardware that’s in there and I’m trying to get this light at the forks real well to show you all what it looks like down and hopefully you get an idea just from from that I’ll go down underneath so you can see what it looks like so anyway that is that next thing I’ve got in the area of wind management on this bike or these little wind deflectors and this is something more specific to the newer V strums which all of them have had complaints among owners about wind buffeting in general and a lot of people mostly replace windshields add those mad Stata just–all brackets and some people on one of them who’ve tried this out changing different mirrors because the softeners some people believe cause wind buffeting to because they’re basically just a big flat square piece but anyway this particular bike you can kind of see this little channel right here and what that does I found is the wind comes around travels across the top here and as it comes around from both sides it ends up bending up along your torso and then buffeting your helmet from below so I copy this design from somebody on the east column form who is making them and basically just deflect the air further around the bike to avoid that situation altogether just moves it out and out and around you and it actually does work this is just an inexpensive sheet of lexan that I bought at Home Depot for a few bucks kind of cut out sort of then you see kind of a I don’t know triangular ish shape and you know I didn’t do a good job of really getting everything nice and maybe you can see the uneven edges but I don’t really care because it’s a functional thing and then the hardware that I use to mount it is just a longer stainless steel bolts and spacers to help kind of keep it up off of there and then these are the little door molding guards that you put on the edge of your car doors to keep it from ninja 250r fairings you know Nick in the edge you can get an auto parts store so I just put clear ones on there and yeah they work pretty well moving down below now honestly I don’t know if this is something that would apply to the first gen dethrones with abs but one of the things that I found for sale online from a company called turret tech or these ABS sensor guards and you know it’s something that a flying Rock could certainly hit that and damaged a TBS sensor which I’m sure is not inexpensive to replace I just didn’t want to pay $50 or whatever it was for to set of those little you know simple guards so I decided to make my own out of some aluminium angle iron then I bought it from Depot let me just show you this stuff right here give you a cross-section so you can kind of see what it looks like so anyway just cut some little short pieces off of it and you can see how I you know sort of shaped it basically did all this with a dremel tool and then the hardware that I’m using them out back because you gotta have a spacer to mount this away from the sensor the spacer that I found that actually works perfectly or some of the factory windshield spacers and the reason why I had those extra was because I just had played around with adjusting the angle of my windscreen part of that was to give me some extra clearance with these hand guards and then the aftermarket handlebars which sit forward a little bit more because they don’t sweep back as much but anyway have the extra spacers and then the bolts interestingly enough are some of the factory bolts that hold on
the little subframe engine mount right here that I had leftover from when I installed these crash bars so it certainly just find some replacement hardware probably adds either Home Depot or a bolt shop in England so that might add a little bit extra cost but again this was you know probably five or six dollars for that piece of angle iron and a little bit of my time so I love those cheap mods like that well last thing I’m going to show you and this is very common on both the current and first gen these phones are the plastic tool tubes these are actually owner’s manual canisters that are designed for like tractors and stuff like that and you’ll find other places like tractor supply I bought these online at a place called a grease supply there’s just a few dollars a piece and then I’m out here with the GB side racks and use some stainless steel hardware along with these little metal band clamps so works quite well I use the top one that’s bigger for carrying my chain lube and a rag bottom one I haven’t really used a whole lot but that’d be great for like tire levers because it’s just the right diameter to throw some of those in there along with maybe a flat repair kit something like that and so only thing I caution you about if you’re gonna mount one lower like this and that’s one of the reasons why I went with a smaller one because yamaha r6 fairings it tucks in more to the outside of the bike because if you look at it from this angle you may have some issues with swing arm clearance if you move through the travel all the way you wouldn’t want that swing arm hitting that tool tube so this one’s e-excuse me seems to be okay but just a cautionary word so you’re aware of that particular issue so anyway that is it that you know get some other plans to do some things like a radiator guard you know I don’t wanna spend 80 90 bucks on the orangey radiator guard and there are some folks that have been making them out of like those little stationery letter trays like you can get it Target or office depot somewhere like that so need to go look for one of those that would work well for me there and mess around with that so anyway I’ll update my youtube channel with additional cheap mods once I get those done and thank you for watching have a good day