The stock grips that came on my KTM Adventure 640 were paper thin rubber and offered no cushion or vibration dampening. After a full day of riding, when you feel like you have been straddling a two-wheeled 400-pound bees nest, your hands could use a little love. I bought some new grips from Sommer KTM in Deutschland last summer, and finally got around to putting them on this past weekend. What I learned is this: the easy things on motorcycles are not always as easy as one might think. Slow down. Take your time. There’s no rush. The hard things are not that hard to figure out, if you don’t have any other alternative but to relax, get inside the problem and figure it out.

When you install new grips on a mountain bike, both grips are the same size on the outside (OD, for “outside diameter”) and they are the same size on the inside (ID, for “inside diameter”). Motorcycle grips are not. Since the throttle handle is a floating sleeve over the bars on the right side of the handlebar, it has a larger OD, thus requiring a grip with a larger ID than the right side. But when you take the new grips out of the package for the first time, they look the same from the outside. When you are looking at two things your hands are going to spend a lot of time grabbing onto, you are focused on the outside (the shape, the taper in the center that will help keep your hands relaxed, the softness of the rubber that will help deaden the buzzing bees). You don’t look inside.

A friend told me to use grip glue, which I purchased from the Honda dealer in Park City, Summit Honda. There are two ways to keep your grips from sliding if they get wet: grip glue, or wiring. Grip glue provides some lube when you are first sliding these on, then it sets up like concrete and makes it impossible to ever change your grips again. Wiring involves tightly wrapping a few strands of thin gauge wire on the ends and in the middle of the grip, and twisting the ends so tight that the wire helps fasten the grips to the aluminum bars. I went with the glue. You see where this is going.

After putting the right grip on the left and realizing it would take a lot of glue to keep that grip from twisting and staying put, and after realizing there was no way in hell the left grip was going to stretch over the throttle sleeve, I quickly undid the mess I made by swapping the grips to their proper places. In the process, I made an even bigger one. With the smaller ID grip now correctly positioned on the left side, I muscled the right grip over the throttle sleeve using generous gobs of glue. A few twists of the throttle and everything seemed fine. A few twists later when the glue had set up, and the throttle would not return to neutral position like it’s supposed to. Stuck wide open, not a good thing on a motorcycle. I had to disassemble the throttle handle clamp, exposing the two throttle cables, slide the floating throttle sleeve back off the bar, and carve away the dried cement, followed by sanding with fine grit sandpaper. The good news is after putting it all back together, the throttle twisted and snapped back like butter. So the moral of the story is something like this: look inside, not outside, if you are truly to see how two things can be more or less the same, only different. And wear rubber gloves when working with glue.

As anyone who has ridden a late model KTM 640 Adventure or 950/990 Adventure in serious muddy conditions knows, it can be devastating when your front wheel stops turning because mud gets clogged between the wheel and fender. I had this happen once at slow speeds on a muddy doubletrack in the Uintas. It didn’t throw me, as I was able to hop off and land on my feet as the bike was going down, but trying to lift the bike and roll it out of the mud bog was like trying to push a 300 orange pig away from the feed trough. That pig wanted to stay put.

So after much research, I threw down $275.00 plus shipping for the Touratech LC8 and LC4 high fender conversion kit. I ordered it online and received it via ground shipping 2 days later. These bikes use many of the same front suspension parts, so the kit is shared between the two models. They also offer it in orange, silver and black fenders. I stuck with the orange. Bartman has a homegrown version on his 950 Adventure, but he had to do some serious mods to make it all come together. His solution to the dual rotor issue on the front was to remove the right side caliper and rotor. When asked about how that works, he said “fine on the dirt, not so good on the road.”

Let’s just say, it was an all day job. The directions were spartan, and translated from German. Non-linear would be one way to describe it; there were several steps I did that had to be undone after moving on to the next steps revealed that I had done something wrong. Also, ending up with extra parts is usually not a good thing. Bartman came over and checked it out and thought everything looked good, and wished that he had bought this kit when he did his fender conversion. The only thing I would suggest to Touratech is to make a kit for shorter travel bikes with a shorter second brake line. I had to re-route my brake lines several times before I got a combination that worked. The supplied second brake line would have been perfect if it was 4 to 5 inches shorter. Check out the pics:

This is a before photo of the old low fender. Also, check out the Dunlop D606 front tire. You can see there is not much clearance there.

View from above of the new high fender kit. Hmmmmmm. Lots of clearance.

View of the fender from down under. Note the stealth black leg protectors and the re-routed secondary brake line to the right caliper.

Close-up view of the double banjo bolt at the master cylinder. This was a beeatch to install, but Bartman says it’s cool. So, it’s cool.