Honda ships the Africa Twin with a cast aluminum side stand. I have no doubt it's to help keep the bike's overall weight as low as possible. Unfortunately, over time, it starts to bend, causing the bike to lean even more than it's intended to (and the AT has one of the steepest lean angles I've seen on a bike). Its flexy nature also means using the side stand for the tried, tested and true method of breaking beads on flat tires is out. Climbing on your fully loaded bike with the stand down can also cause its early demise.
To combat this problem, we designed an all steel, heavy duty replacement kick stand. The center piece of the part is the machined billet mounting lug. Add some DOM tubing and a Camel's foot print at the base that's substantially larger than the stock part then TIG weld the whole thing together. Once it's powdercoated, you have the Camel Toe Side Stand!
Available in three lengths:
2017 was the 34th annual LA-Barstow-Vegas (LAB2V) ride. This 2 day event sees 500 dualsport riders travel over 400miles through the desert from Palmdale, California to Barstow the first day and and Barstow to the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas on the second day.
I rode this event in 2015 on the shop KTM 1190R and had a great time. This year, I loaded the Africa Twin the the back of the newly acquired Sprinter van drove the 2100km to Vegas. Slamming and banging through the desert at +110km/h was the perfect opportunity to continue testing our new Africa Twin windscreen support and tweak the new suspension under the AT!
The event is mostly fast sandy 2 track but there are some technical sections along the way too. Red Rock Canyon is right at the end of day 2. The rocky sections though the canyon didn't disappoint!
The difference in suspension ride after the re-sprung and re-valved was night and day. Despite this huge jump over stock we were still having issues with hard bottoming when we were riding hard and fast. The Showa fork (internals) on the Africa Twin are literally from a '89-91 CR500R dirt bike. Obviously suspension technology has improved drastically since '89. On top of the old technology, the CR500 is literally 1/2 the weight of the CRF1000L. No amount of tuning was going to get these forks where I wanted them.
The solution? Fork swap! The Kayaba SSS forks were first used in 2006 on Yamaha dirt bikes and are still used on current models. They received rave reviews and still win dirt bike magazine and website shoots outs against some very new, very high tech forks. The KYB SSS units are considered by many to be the best dirt bike forks ever offered from the factory on any brand or model. The best part? They can be had for a couple hundred $$ if you look hard enough!
The swap is pretty straight forward. I put together a few part vlog on the swap process. Check it out part 1 below.
I'm very happy to announce the pre-sale for our new Africa Twin fuel tank is up! Order before Saturday May 20th and save $50 off the regular price. We are also including the tethered fuel cap upgrade at no charge for all pre-sale orders.
Add 6.5L of fuel to your bike's range for a total of 25.5L!
