I am still not sure if I like it, but let's just say that I needed to find something to do in the garage (You will understand, if you are married with children, have a mortgage, 2 dogs, and work for the man). In short....I took off the white beak / proboscis. As soon as I did this I realized that the black piece underneath it was structural. If you remove that, as well.....the headlight enclosure will flop around. Besides, the black piece has the rear part of the fender, and that is definitely needed. I will probably come to the conclusion that the front white part is needed, as soon as I get splashed with the mud on my Sierra forest trails. But it was a fun 30 minute experiment. The look sort of went from a plasticky dirt bike one....to a naked bike with a pincer. Looks like an an angry Swedish ant. Here are two iphone pics for general amusement purposes.
Well, it's different for sure. I think that you'll find that a lot more than mud will get thrown up. Water, sand, any debris in the road will get tossed forward and blown back into your face. Let us know how it works.
Spot on Ken, if you look at a standard XChallenge front guard and how long it is, well it wasn't long enough to stop water, mud and crap coming up over the front of the guard and back on the bike and rider, especially the rider. Touratech made an extension piece for the guard while others made up forward facing mud flaps to cut down on the flying crap.
You could try a front fender for a DRZ400... I got one for mine by an Italian company called UFO that's much shorter/less pointy than stock. I'll try to find a pic- Couldn't find the stock/UFO side by side, but this is the UFO installed.
Most of the supermoto front fenders aren't bike specific (have to drill your own holes). May be worth checking out or you can adapt a front fender from larger supermoto-ish bikes like the hyper motard. That actually may look really cool
My hyper is sitting right behind my drz- the fender on them is part of the headlight housing- won't work. It's ugly to boot- I lopped half of mine off and it looks loads better. The drz fender (and all other dirtbike/sumo fenders) come without holes drilled- so it could work well, plus they are super cheap
I'd love to hear more info on beak options. My Strada looks chopped without a nose, and I love the look of the hypermotard beak or the Dorsoduro.
Only problem there is you don't have the boss(es) on your forks to mount it. With things stock you can mount a Terra fender and fork protectors on a Strada, but you can't mount a Strada fender on a Terra. I'm not saying it's impossible....just harder and going to require some noodling and/or fabrication.
