Not the sort of thing to adorn your K but for those other bikes lurking in your man-shed these might just be the best thing you could ever fit.
My wee Honda has many endearing features, go anywhere plodability, reasonable speed for a 250, good weather protection with the screen and the handguards and of course, legendary Honda reliability.
However, those handguards were made of ticky-tacky and were rapidly binned to be replaced by Barkbuster Jets with a solid, two-point fixing, aluminium backbone that will probably withstand a nuclear attack but they are not big enough to force the icy winter blast over the back of your hands, rather letting it hit them. Not cool; in fact bloody chilly. So, the first thing was to fit plastic spoilers to the top of the guards to effect better air-flow.
This was much better in the grim and grime but it is only when you sit behind a different set of bars that you realise just how amazing is the fairing on the K as it manages to chuck all that blast away from your pinkies, at least, on the S and GT.
I don't do wet and I don't do cold so I decided I needed some heated grips on the Honda, bearing in mind that I don't really know how to turn them on on the K.
I could have spent £80 on the latest Oxford UK-spec HotGrips with 9 heat settings(?) and waterproof, screw-together plugs and sockets. Or, I could spend £50 on the original grips with a mere(?) 5 settings and boring old non-weatherproof jobbies as found on old-fashioned Optimates.
So, I just spent a happy hour or so freezing my nuts off in my fog-bound man-cave ripping off the old, brand new grips and fitting the Oxfords. It was all going so well until that inevitable 'oh shit' moment but more of that anon...
The old grips came off with a Stanley knife and a quick tug and the left bar grip went on with the help of a few well aimed blows from my mallet. The twistgrip was another thing altogether.
Sure enough, just as the included Polish and German instructions warned, the twistgrip slider was replete with blobs and bobbles moulded into the outer surface. So, having spent an hour slicing and chiselling them all off, the right grip was ready to slip on. I slipped it half way on and then drizzled a little of the supplied Superglue on the inner end of the slider and inside the outer end of the HotGrip.
And here is the 'oh shit' moment...as I reached for the mallet to tap it into place, I realised that the superglue in the grip was, (because I am a twonk and had the bars on full left lock, meaning that the right bar was pointing UP) now dripping inexorably DOWN and to my horror coating not only the grip and the outer of the slider, but also oozing between the inside of the slider and the bar itself.
This was not a good thing!
In a second or two the grip was going to be welded half on and half off and the twistgrip would never, well, twist again. One hand grabbed the grip and began to work it open and closed manically while t'other bashed the grip on with the mallet. Open-closed-open-closed-open-closed etc. etc.
My third hand managed to unbolt the switch block and get the twistgrip off before the Superglue set like concrete, open-closed-open-closed etc. etc.
Another pot of tea and an hour with a half-round file inside the slider and some very rough sandpaper round the bar and it was all back to being a twisty twistgrip.
A handful of cable ties and bolting the fused leads across the battery (so, so simple) had the installation complete and ready for testing.
Wow! Wow, wow, wow! These heated grips are HOT.
They are thicker than the originals, by about the few millimetres thickness of the Grip Puppies I had on there before and so I haven't bothered to re-fit the foam padded covers but even so, there is a serious amount of heat coming from the Oxfords. My infra-red thermometer measured the lowest setting, marked as 30%, giving off 20 degrees of warmth and the maximum setting (100%, doh) being a pinkie-toasting 40 degrees, more than enough for me I am sure.
The totally sealed, bar-mounted controller has two raised buttons (so easy to find with cold fingers with gloves on in the dark), marked + and - . A single press of the + button makes the grips spring into life on the lowest setting with a green LED showing. A long press on the + button from 'off' brings the grips on at full with a nice warm red LED showing. The three mid-positions are 40, 50 and 75% respectively. A long press on the - button switches the unit off.
This controller has a couple of neat tricks up its insulated cable sleeve. Firstly, it has a second, separate, green LED in the centre of the unit which denotes when the controller is in Battery Saving Mode. This mode is user selectable (with a permanent memory so it stays in the mode you select even when off) and when it is ON it will turn the heat off if the battery voltage falls below 11.5v and back on again when it rises.
AND, miraculously, it also turns the unit off (well, into standby where it draws 76 micro-amps) after 2 minutes when there is no 'noise' on the 12v line; so, if you turn the bike off and forget to turn off the grips of if you leave the bike running to warm up the grips and it happens to stall. So, you either come back to an idling motor and toasty grips or cold grips but with your battery still in one piece.
Overall I am very pleased with the quality, fit and operation of the whole set up and am blown away by the heat produced.
Now I need to start carrying a fire extinguisher as well as the kitchen sink...