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.