Santa has been good to the xs!!
But for the next installment on my chronicles let’s talk fenders….
First things first, I really, really like the look of the stock fender and struts on the 76 model. I just think it’s classy looking and it’s something that I didn’t want to compromise on, so I just needed to acquire one. To this end I am very envious of ye guys in the states with access to such a vast amount of dirt-cheap, low mileage, rust free parts.
After spending a few weeks on ebay etc I quickly learned that there was no hope of me ever bagging a nice original front fender set up here in Europe that still had all its chrome, or didn’t cost what ye guys over in the states could get a whole bike for!!
So after changing my ebay search settings to “worldwide” it didn’t take long to find a variety of decent fenders from as little as $25. Things were looking good and I eventually settled for a clean fender with decent chrome and struts included for just $75, plus another $60 to ship, a bargain when you consider that a fender of similar quality here would fetch €300 easily.
It was only after its arrival that things started to get a bit odd.
I went out and attempted a trial fit on my bike, the first thing I noticed was that the mounts at the top of the fork leg wouldn’t line up, so with the front pair of holes secured the rear ones were out of line by about 5mm. Undeterred I proceeded by just tightening up the front holes and moving on. The struts were next and seemed to mount to the lower fork legs without incident.
Taking a step back to work out the top mounting and thinking I might be able to get away with just drilling a pair of new holes at the rear of the mount I noticed that the fender was very closely mounted to the front tire, so much so that I couldn’t even get my pinky finger in between. Grabbing a tape measure showed there was only approx. 10mm of clearance, something didn’t seem right.
It was from here that I decided that more research was required, which lead me to the following threads:
It turns out that the Euro models have a unique front end compared to the rest of the world, cross referencing the part numbers with the genuine parts books i acquired confirmed this.
As you can see from the pics below the first difference is the height of the fork brace mounts – 150mm tall for the US version and 175mm for the Euro version.
As described earlier, the hole spacing for where they mount to the fork is also different between the two items, 60mm for the US version and 50mm for the Euro version.
Swapping over these mounts is an option, though not as straightforward as I would have hoped as the spacing where they are riveted at the top of the guard is different.
The measurements for the US spec guard is approx. 82mm centre to centre horizontally and 57mm vertically.
The corresponding Euro values are approx. 73mm centre to centre horizontally and 42mm vertically.
There seems to be enough meat left on the euro mount to drill new holes, so this option is viable if i can find the right struts.
This brings us to our problem child, the struts……….
With the legs of the struts on the bench standing, the US versions are approx. 337mm tall to the centre of the strut.
As already established above, the euro fork mounts are 25mm longer than the US fork mounts, so the struts I need must be 362mm. This is an issue because with Euro spec parts come Euro spec prices and the cheapest decent set of struts I can find come in at €150 plus shipping.
However, searches for struts of this length have provided interesting results, see post #10 in the link below.
From the above thread, the struts from an xs2 appear to be the right length, though the part numbers do not match so I don’t think they will just bolt on. More research is required to see if there is a difference, probably the bolt pattern, radius of curve etc.
So, I’m going to see if I can find the measurements for the xs2 struts and if they work out, and I can find a good pair cheap then happy days, in the mean time I will keep on the look out for a set of euro struts that are more reasonably priced.
Thanks for staying with me and happy holidays.