Everything was going along just fine in life and then a strange package showed up at the front door.
It was addressed to me and the return address was some obscure cycle shop I had never heard of in Texas. It was in a plain brown box, wrapped with a little too much clear shipping tape. I put in on the kitchen counter and did what anyone else would do having lived through the Unibomber years – I cleared the house and then called the Walnut Creek Bomb Squad. They showed up in pretty quickly. Long story short, they did an x-ray and found no trigger device. Phew!
Upon opening the suspicious package, it appeared to be a slightly used hunk of billet aluminum. I thought about tossing it in the recycling bin. Just before I did I took a picture of it and sent that to our group text thread.
Oh crap! I guess I may have overreacted just a bit. I ordered two dozen Krispy Creams to be delivered to the Bomb Squad with a sincere apology note. I apologized to the wife and told her it was safe for her and the dogs to come in out of the rain.
Back to the group text…
I remember us having the discussion around the fire about what to protect and what not to protect.
On one hand I bought the 690 because I wanted something that was light weight (see https://aufroad.com/2014-ktm-690-enduro-r/). Except for the exhaust, every single thing you add (for protection, for performance, or for style) is generally going to increase that weight.
Mike T. bought a new 2024 690 and we did Death Valley with almost no mods on his bike. No skid plate, no hand guards – absolutely stock. His 890 that he’s had for a while is also pretty much all stock. He’s not trying to be light – he’s just not big into modification and that’s ok.
One the other hand adding protection to your bike may make it heavier but it might also increase the chance of completing your ride with no issues. You can’t protect against everything and you wouldn’t want to. You have to draw the line somewhere. Every rider is going fall somewhere on the sliding scale between bone stock / light weight – and – overly protected / and heavy.
Because of the way I ride and some of the drops the bike takes, I naturally bias towards the overly protected. We’re riding out in the middle of nowhere and a broken bike would be a big issue to recover.
Mike T. is more willing to take that risk, right?
We were discussing this concept around the fire – the pros and cons of each. I suggested that sometimes a rider might have a freak accident where a rock goes through his radiator or side case (something that might be really rare and little chance of ever happening again) but from then on he’s always going protect especially that thing.
Charles had his 701 and had what looked like a pretty heavy disc guard on the front end. It looked pretty swag I will admit. I think his was a NiceCNC version.
I had mentioned that in almost 50 years of riding I have never needed the protection a disc guard provided, never bent a disk. Not even a ding. Nobody else had either, so why did he have a disk guard on his bike? Why carry the extra weight?
As it turns out, Charles was riding the LAB2V before we met. On Day 2 he was going along a rocky section just before the checkpoint at Baker if I remember right and bent his front disk! It ended his day, ended his being able to finish. Which leads back to my theory that if something weird/rare happens to you, you’ll do most anything to protect it in the future.
So that’s the whole back story of me making fun of his disk guard.
I looked up the part on Flatland Racing website (https://flatlandracing.com/products/2008-2019-ktm-690-front-guard) to see if I needed to do anything special or was missing anything.
It looks like a simple install and it looks like I had everything I needed. There was one thing. Those hex bolts looked HUGE! I measured them and they were M8 and the stock fork binder bolts looked smaller – like maybe M6, right?
I texted Charles direct and he sent me a screenshot of the parts fiche – amazingly they were M8!
So the install was simple.
- Remove the stock M8 pinch bolts completely.
- Put the guard in place.
- Put M8 hex bolt into guard, then spacer, then threaded into fork
- Tighten to spec.
- add Nyloc Nut.
I checked for clearance issues and there was none. It’s probably just me but I did have an issue with these big hex bolts. It just struck me as looking less than factory if that makes sense.
So I hopped on over to Amazon and ordered some better looking bolts to replace the hex.
These will look much much better. Before the bolts arrived I had my next ride scheduled with Mike T. We did some pretty hard sections and I’m happy to say the guard worked as it should have.
SIDENOTE #1: Mike T. in Death Valley on his stock bike… punched a hole in his clutch cover and now has protection on his bike for that. Proves my theory.
SIDENOTE #2: Is it spelled “DISC” or “DISK”? I’ve seen it spelled both ways, sometimes on the same website. I’ve used it both ways back a forth this whole article and you didn’t notice so is it really important? Even the title and the url of this post are different.
SIDENOTE #3: Since I purposefully made fun of Charles’s 701, I am anxiously awaiting that delivery too. So far, no moto trailers have shown up. I’ll keep you posted.
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, had a big cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and is currently building a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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