ok well as regulars might know I’ve been on a bit of a mission lately to repair the wear-and-tear from the wheelies & drifting practice so far, as well as protect the bike for future wheelie activity.

It’s been hard on the bike, and highlighted any pre-existing weaknesses, but I also learnt a lot about what I want and need from the bike in order to do this in a not entirely half-assed way.

I love the clipon risers I’ve been rocking most of this year. My “ideal comfort position” was with them not even on full height, about half height. It added maybe 1.5″ each side in height and the same in width. It didn’t mess with the aerodynamics too much, but gives excellent control from the slightly wider stance, but you can still get down in the corners when you need to. Nice.

However, not so good for standup wheelies. Angles all wrong, doable but feels unnatural. We don’t have lots of power to play with so I need to try and optimise my position as far as I can. I needed to try and push weight back so she comes up more easily, so I added a bit more height to the clipons, which helped but was higher than I’d like and the angle was still wrong somehow, and the brake reservoir hit on the screen constantly which is super annoying.

Continue reading Fitting the motox bars to the YZF-R125: success! →

So it turns out I’m not the only person who’s interested in having different bars on the R125 – someone who I’ve been chatting to a lot about these bikes is also interested in this but didn’t want to go any wider with the bars – my clip-on arrangement added a few cm each side to the width (and you notice the increased drag so it’s a fair point.

Motox bars would be about the same width as my clipon setup but they can also be trimmed down a bit so should be no wider than the standard bars, just a little higher and angled a bit differently.

So after much back and forth about how best to do this and whether it would be strong enough I thought enough discussion, time to drill some holes and try bolting the motox risers onto the yoke directly and find out for sure.. and here we are.

There’s nothing like drilling holes in something to get a feel for just how solid it is (or not), and in this case I got the impression this yoke is actually pretty damn sturdy.

At the point of the holes I guess it was looking like ~5mm thick, and add to that the strength from the shape of the casting and any reservations I had about the top yoke not being strong enough were pretty much put to rest.

What struck me as important was to get a nice even pull on the bolt so that everything lines up correctly and doesn’t end up with weird forces putting stresses in places there shouldn’t be stresses, which could lead to cracks, bolt snappage or things wearing loose over time, none of which we want on our main means of steering the bike.

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Continue reading MotoX bars on YZF-R125 →