I really dislike the visibility with the stock mirrors. On my old 200 and a friends CB750 the visibility was quite good. I’m constantly having to tuck in my elbows to get a good view behind.

To keep this on track, but provide some background info, last year I took a short trip to visit the inlaws. About 1800km in total. During the return trip I dropped the bike after sliding in a bit of gravel on the shoulder of the highway. I was intentionally pulling off to change shirts, and the gravel was sparse, but enough to make the front wheel lock up. Some minor damage from that, but nothing that stopped riding it home. After a week or so I figured out how to fix that mirror and got it back on the bike. It worked awesome. I say it ‘worked’ because it only lasted 9 months before I went to adjust the mirror for another long ride and pushed a bit too hard, breaking the weak point of the fix.

So, at this point I have no RH mirror (it’s in two pieces) and a perfectly good LH mirror.

That is until I parked the bike and was thinking about something else and didn’t put the kickstand down. Idiot. IDIOT. I D I O T. No more LH mirror. It broke where the mirror shaft attaches to the O that mounts to the base plate.

The local Kawasaki shop wants $80/ea for factory mirrors and $40/ea for suitable replacements. Some sort of baseplate and a screw on mirror assembly. Neither was appealing. I’d rather have stock mirrors, but not for that price.

I’m not broke, or a student, or really cheap. Frugal yes.

Thought about this for a couple days, three trips to Home Depot and a few bags of misc hardware and I’ve put the RH mirror back together.

This picture is the FIRST prototype. Turns out it was WAY too damn long. I had an additional 5″ on the original length.

But with some tweaking, I came up with this…

Here are some comparison shots..

And finally what it looks like with the boot on.

This project is not finished !

The exposed metal looks crappy. It’s plated with something, so should be rust proof. But I want it covered. Going to go get some black rubber hose to sleeve it, and hopefully it won’t look too bad.

Since the RH one is completed and I’m quite happy with the results (including doing road tests) I’m going to mod the same to the left hand one and do a whole write up. I’m going to host it on my site, and post it all on here.

So ya, hopefully over the next week or so I will get on that project and start writing.

This pic shows all the hardware parts used in the final version.