New bike news

Since taking delivery of my new (to me) KTM 690 Enduro not a lot has happened on the motorbike front due to a combination of snow fall, Christmas, New Year and high winds!

Well a few things have happened in the garage…

First off I wanted to fit my old Metal Mule top box for when I ride to work, although the bike has Touratech Zega panniers, they are mahoosively wide (not good for traffic) and have no locks fitted. The top box had previously been fitted to my 990 Adventure and I had the Metal Mule, tubular steel rack to suit that attaches with four bolts. It just so happens the flat aluminium rack on the 690 attaches to the pannier frames with four bolts. But yes you guessed right; they don’t line up at all!

However I did note the rack on the bike had four holes in the same pattern as the 990 rack, obviously being designed to fit that model too. So why not just bolt one rack to the other, in effect using the aluminium rack as an adapter. Unfortunately the rack is of a size where the rear edge prevents the top box mount from fitting round the MM rack and of course adds unnecessary weight. The 690 has a plastic sub frame (also the standard fuel tank), so the weight of the rack/top box is borne by the pannier frames and as a result I wanted to keep extra weight to a minimum.

OK so I could trim a piece off the rear of the rack but whilst pondering this I realised I could cut the 4 mm thick rack down to make a much smaller and lighter adaptor. But this would be a waste of the rack that could potentially be re-sold, at which point I remembered I had some 3 mm aluminium plate in the garage, so using the aluminium rack as a guide I created an adaptor plate, just large enough as required.

This seems to be working well although there is some movement in the top box but largely due to gaps between its mounts and the rack, I had the same problem on the 990 and cured it with some pieces of inner tube wrapped round the rack in appropriate places. In the meantime this is causing a bit of movement in the adaptor plate which could cause a fracture in the aluminium, so a “cable tie engineering solution” has been employed to attach the MM rack to the Touratech pannier frames, a bit Heath Robinson but in the event of a fracture it will prevent the top box disappearing down the road!

I’m also thinking of replacing the aluminium adaptor with a steel plate to guard against the risk of fracture or possibly using a thicker piece of aluminium… stand by for Mk 2

I did get out for a ride on the Saturday before Christmas over to my sister’s, which also included a few byways (see picture at top) and I discovered a few things…

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• The Metzeller Sahara tyres are great on the road, reasonable on gravel and hard pack and totally shite in mud.

• The bike pulls monster wheelies on the throttle in second gear without much provocation – I’d better be a bit gentler on the throttle in future!

• The dip beam in the Lynx fairing is excellent but was set much too high so I got regularly flashed by motorists on the way home in the dark; next job sort out the headlight.

And what of Grainne’s new Freeride 250? It has been waiting for the rear shock to be rebuilt and the lower seat to arrive so she wasn’t able to pick it up before the KTM Centre closed over Christmas and the New Year but watch this space.....