I’d had enough of the stock mirrors on the DRZ, totally obstructing the view making it feel clumsy and ‘special’. But, with a failed delivery on some Highway Dirt Bike mirrors I was at a loss as to what to replace them with.
Then I stumbled across these little understated hanguard mirrors for $28 USD a pair on Motostrano. Chucked in a set of Zeta CP Pivoting levers so I could use a discount code, and a few days later all of my gear arrived.
Turns out these mirrors are the perfect match for the PowerMadd hand guards I had already replaced the stock bark busters with, in fact they are PowerMadd mirrors made to fit the ATV guards I had, so I couldn’t be happier with how things turned out. Don’t know why the Motostrano site doesn’t make it clearer on site.
These mirrors are really clever. Simple to mount with plenty of options too. To install with the flip down mechanism, you have to drill one hole into your guard like this.
then you simply thread the bolt through onto a spring
Then bolt it on.
From there you can flip it down and out of the way to make room for splitting, but this isn’t a really solid easy movement that I’d be attempting in traffic.
The great thing about cheap dirt bikes is that everything comes apart with a 10mm spanner, a shifter and an allen key, so nothing takes very long to wrench on and off.
Next up were some nice pivoting levers. The ZETA ones were on sale for $55 USD at Motostrano and with a coupon code for spending over $100 I scored a $25 discount off my total order. Nice.
Levers are a piece of cake again with one 10mm spanner. Bam, shiny.
Something still didn’t sit right with the mirrors hanging out the end of the guards like that though, reminded me of flipping them in and out to split on the Hyper, which I remembered as quite annoying.
So I took the guard covers out and lifted the mirrors up onto the inside of the bark buster, mounting it through a ventilation hole.
Gold this is gold. It does three things. Reduces the width of teh bars, reduces the amount of vibration on the mirrors, and gives an unimpeded clear view from where I sit.
The end result is visually, I think, quite pleasing.
Could definitely do with a set of Fat Bars to get rid of that stabiliser bar/pad and clean up the bars a bit more (yes Steve, you told me so). I’d also like to get a Vapor trail tech dash – anything would be an improvement on the basic stock atari one.
But for now there you have it, I’ve literally made the mirrors disappear.
Like I said, visually pleasing. Speaking of visually…. I’ve spent a few hours dicking around with the mirrors on the road now and visually you can’t actually see a lot out of these mirrors. I found that by rotating them in the right spot, I can see past my elbows and a wee bit behind me but I’m not phased. On a commute scoot like this I’m either in pole position at the lights or doing a head check every single time I change lanes so the mirrors are really there just to keep the Po-Po away and that cursed yellow sticker.
The below ‘before & after’ shot reminds me how far I’ve come, and how much I’ve enjoyed the journey. Wrenching on Dizzy myself I have learnt stuff I didn’t think I was capable, nothing huge like doing a big bore kit, but stuff like taking the rear wheel off, installing the tail tidy, figuring out wiring looms etc. It’s been a total blast and I can’t wait to attempt the last large upgrade, the Yoshimura RS-4 exhaust (that is finally in transit).
Playing with bikes is f****g good fun.
