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I thought there may be some that could benefit from this. Please note that it is specific to the 750! There are some differences between it and the 600 when it comes to the risers and measurements required to make this work.
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A while back I purchased and installed a set of Vortex clip-ons for my 2001 Suzuki Katana 750. The purpose of doing this, while admittedly also thinking it looked cool, was to give me a more aggressive stance on the bike. I quickly found that there were many additional benefits to repositioning my hand placement and removing the stock setup. The following are some pros and cons to having them, as well as the process I used to install them.
Pros
* Hand Placement/Body Positioning – By installing the clip-ons my hands were lowered about 3 inches overall from the stock setup. By that I mean that the bars are 2 inches lower, but there’s also a 10 down angle now which gives me almost 1 additional inch. This changes your whole body positioning, bringing you forward and down, as well as place you more…around the tank, so to speak. This is especially helpful when you’re leaned over hanging off the bike in the turns, as I’m sure the SS riders can attest to. When you’re heading into a turn, your body placement is key…head down over the mirror, butt shifted off the seat. The problem with the stock Kat setup is that when you’re down in this position, your hands will be up higher and it will feel quite awkward. The clip-ons place your hands in such a manner that when you go down into the correct position, your hands are already there and your outer forearm will end up right against the side of the gas tank. Perfect positioning on this bike IMHO.
* Communication With The Bike – The stock bar risers have big old rubber dampeners between them and the triple. While this is great for comfort, it hurts you when you’re pushing the bike and need to know what it’s doing. The best way I can put this is to think of rubber dampeners as a bad interpreter. It will tell you what the bike is saying, but a lot of it will get lost in the translation. With the clip-ons, your hands are directly in contact with the forks…and you speak the same language as the bike. Whatever it’s doing, you know about it…directly from the source. This is the single biggest advantage you have when riding hard, you know exactly what your bike is saying…no middle man.
Cons
* Hand Placement, Body Positioning, & Vibration – They say you can’t have your cake and eat it too…this is the case with the clip-ons. With your body and hand positioning moved forward and down, there’s more weight on your hands. Expect your back and wrists to get tired more quickly than with the stock setup. The Kat is designed to be a “Sport Tourer” after all. Also, without the dampeners you will feel everything…including the engine vibrations. This will also hurt your comfort level.
What it all boils down to is “What do you want out of your Kat?”. For those that say the Katana isn’t a capable bike, I say come spend some time with the likes of Bisq & myself at the Gap. It is a very capable bike, and I’m pretty sure that most people who upgrade from it never even touch its’ full potential. If you want the Kat for a tourer, it’s setup quite well from the factory for that. If you want the Kat to hit the twisties hard, you can…with a few mods it’ll do quite well.
The Install Process
**This installation requires the front end to be lowered 1/4". The safest way to do this is either with triple stand, by using the center stand and securing down the rear end, or by suspending the bike by the triple clamp. This will allow you to loosen the triple and slide the fork tubes easily. I do not recommend the process that I used and take NO responsibility for the results.**
Having said that crap, I believe it took me just about an hour from start to finish on this. If you do it right, you can lower the front end quickly and safely without jacking the bike up or anything.
Step 1 – Removing the old setup
The first thing you need to do is remove the stock handle bars from the risers. Now, for this install you do NOT have to replace you stock handlebars with the ones provided by Vortex unless you want to. I opted not to for three reasons…#1 less work to do…#2 the stock bars have a welded nut on the end for the bar end. If you switch out the bars, you’ll need new bar ends…#3 less work to do!! I recommend keeping the stock bars. Assuming you elect to do that, just unbolt the bars from the risers and lay them on the faring (with a towel underneath of course). Now, we’re on to the risers. If you’re looking at the handlebar risers from the top, you’ll see what looks like 4 bolt heads recessed in the risers. As you’ll see, there is nothing to grab onto when you remove the nuts from down below the triple. These bolt heads actually have grooves down the sides of them, but that won’t do you much good. If you apply a socket to the nut underneath and turn, they may come free easily. In my case, they didn’t and the bolt started turning. My solution was to take a very small flathead screwdriver and wedge it between the bolt head and the riser. **This did mar the riser slightly, so keep that in mind. Once you have the four nuts removed the riser will lift out of the triple clamp and you’ll see the rubber dampeners…pull them out as well. This completes the removal of the stock setup.
Step 2 – Lowering the front end
After you remove the risers, you will notice that the fork tubes are sticking up through the triple clamp. If you place one of the clip-ons on the fork tube, you’ll see that there isn’t quite enough tube sticking up to get the clip-ons fully on the tubes. This is the reason why you must lower the front end. There are 3 bolts on each fork tube (6 total) securing them to the triple clamp. Two are up high, and one is down low. For each tube, loosen both the lower bolts and the middle bolts enough that you can move them freely with your hands. **Be very careful with this next step. Loosen the remaining bolt on each fork tube very, VERY slightly…not enough to move the forks. If you loosen them too much…BOOM…you don’t want that to happen. You’re then going to want to take a rubber mallet and tap on the triple clamp (dead center), which should cause it to drop down on the tubes a little at a time. In my case, I left the last two bolts pretty tight, so I had to beat pretty hard on the triple with the mallet…which was fine by me, better safe than sorry. You want to keep your clip-ons handy so you can check it after each hit to make sure you don’t go too far. Check both sides each time because it is possible for one side to be further down than the other…which happened in my case. If you get one side down to the point you need before the other, STOP. Tighten up that side so that it won’t go any further. Hit all three bolts just to make sure it won’t slip anymore. Then go back to hitting the triple until the other side is where you need it. Once that’s done, tighten up all the bolts and the lowering process is complete. Note: This ¼” drop will give you a slightly quicker turn-in so keep that in mind on your first ride.
Step 3 – Installation of the clip-ons
The final step is to install the clip-ons, which is a pretty simple process. Place the clip-ons onto the forks and snug the bolts up, leaving them loose enough to make adjustments. Insert the handle bars into the clip-ons and make all necessary adjustments before tightening up everything. Properly adjusted, there are zero clearance issues at any point of the turning radius. Just take your time making the adjustments and everything will be fine.
This first ride’s going to feel quite a bit different. Be sure to take it easy to give yourself some time to adjust to the difference.
__________________________________________________
A while back I purchased and installed a set of Vortex clip-ons for my 2001 Suzuki Katana 750. The purpose of doing this, while admittedly also thinking it looked cool, was to give me a more aggressive stance on the bike. I quickly found that there were many additional benefits to repositioning my hand placement and removing the stock setup. The following are some pros and cons to having them, as well as the process I used to install them.
Pros
* Hand Placement/Body Positioning – By installing the clip-ons my hands were lowered about 3 inches overall from the stock setup. By that I mean that the bars are 2 inches lower, but there’s also a 10 down angle now which gives me almost 1 additional inch. This changes your whole body positioning, bringing you forward and down, as well as place you more…around the tank, so to speak. This is especially helpful when you’re leaned over hanging off the bike in the turns, as I’m sure the SS riders can attest to. When you’re heading into a turn, your body placement is key…head down over the mirror, butt shifted off the seat. The problem with the stock Kat setup is that when you’re down in this position, your hands will be up higher and it will feel quite awkward. The clip-ons place your hands in such a manner that when you go down into the correct position, your hands are already there and your outer forearm will end up right against the side of the gas tank. Perfect positioning on this bike IMHO.
* Communication With The Bike – The stock bar risers have big old rubber dampeners between them and the triple. While this is great for comfort, it hurts you when you’re pushing the bike and need to know what it’s doing. The best way I can put this is to think of rubber dampeners as a bad interpreter. It will tell you what the bike is saying, but a lot of it will get lost in the translation. With the clip-ons, your hands are directly in contact with the forks…and you speak the same language as the bike. Whatever it’s doing, you know about it…directly from the source. This is the single biggest advantage you have when riding hard, you know exactly what your bike is saying…no middle man.
Cons
* Hand Placement, Body Positioning, & Vibration – They say you can’t have your cake and eat it too…this is the case with the clip-ons. With your body and hand positioning moved forward and down, there’s more weight on your hands. Expect your back and wrists to get tired more quickly than with the stock setup. The Kat is designed to be a “Sport Tourer” after all. Also, without the dampeners you will feel everything…including the engine vibrations. This will also hurt your comfort level.
What it all boils down to is “What do you want out of your Kat?”. For those that say the Katana isn’t a capable bike, I say come spend some time with the likes of Bisq & myself at the Gap. It is a very capable bike, and I’m pretty sure that most people who upgrade from it never even touch its’ full potential. If you want the Kat for a tourer, it’s setup quite well from the factory for that. If you want the Kat to hit the twisties hard, you can…with a few mods it’ll do quite well.
The Install Process
**This installation requires the front end to be lowered 1/4". The safest way to do this is either with triple stand, by using the center stand and securing down the rear end, or by suspending the bike by the triple clamp. This will allow you to loosen the triple and slide the fork tubes easily. I do not recommend the process that I used and take NO responsibility for the results.**
Having said that crap, I believe it took me just about an hour from start to finish on this. If you do it right, you can lower the front end quickly and safely without jacking the bike up or anything.
Step 1 – Removing the old setup
The first thing you need to do is remove the stock handle bars from the risers. Now, for this install you do NOT have to replace you stock handlebars with the ones provided by Vortex unless you want to. I opted not to for three reasons…#1 less work to do…#2 the stock bars have a welded nut on the end for the bar end. If you switch out the bars, you’ll need new bar ends…#3 less work to do!! I recommend keeping the stock bars. Assuming you elect to do that, just unbolt the bars from the risers and lay them on the faring (with a towel underneath of course). Now, we’re on to the risers. If you’re looking at the handlebar risers from the top, you’ll see what looks like 4 bolt heads recessed in the risers. As you’ll see, there is nothing to grab onto when you remove the nuts from down below the triple. These bolt heads actually have grooves down the sides of them, but that won’t do you much good. If you apply a socket to the nut underneath and turn, they may come free easily. In my case, they didn’t and the bolt started turning. My solution was to take a very small flathead screwdriver and wedge it between the bolt head and the riser. **This did mar the riser slightly, so keep that in mind. Once you have the four nuts removed the riser will lift out of the triple clamp and you’ll see the rubber dampeners…pull them out as well. This completes the removal of the stock setup.
Step 2 – Lowering the front end
After you remove the risers, you will notice that the fork tubes are sticking up through the triple clamp. If you place one of the clip-ons on the fork tube, you’ll see that there isn’t quite enough tube sticking up to get the clip-ons fully on the tubes. This is the reason why you must lower the front end. There are 3 bolts on each fork tube (6 total) securing them to the triple clamp. Two are up high, and one is down low. For each tube, loosen both the lower bolts and the middle bolts enough that you can move them freely with your hands. **Be very careful with this next step. Loosen the remaining bolt on each fork tube very, VERY slightly…not enough to move the forks. If you loosen them too much…BOOM…you don’t want that to happen. You’re then going to want to take a rubber mallet and tap on the triple clamp (dead center), which should cause it to drop down on the tubes a little at a time. In my case, I left the last two bolts pretty tight, so I had to beat pretty hard on the triple with the mallet…which was fine by me, better safe than sorry. You want to keep your clip-ons handy so you can check it after each hit to make sure you don’t go too far. Check both sides each time because it is possible for one side to be further down than the other…which happened in my case. If you get one side down to the point you need before the other, STOP. Tighten up that side so that it won’t go any further. Hit all three bolts just to make sure it won’t slip anymore. Then go back to hitting the triple until the other side is where you need it. Once that’s done, tighten up all the bolts and the lowering process is complete. Note: This ¼” drop will give you a slightly quicker turn-in so keep that in mind on your first ride.
Step 3 – Installation of the clip-ons
The final step is to install the clip-ons, which is a pretty simple process. Place the clip-ons onto the forks and snug the bolts up, leaving them loose enough to make adjustments. Insert the handle bars into the clip-ons and make all necessary adjustments before tightening up everything. Properly adjusted, there are zero clearance issues at any point of the turning radius. Just take your time making the adjustments and everything will be fine.
This first ride’s going to feel quite a bit different. Be sure to take it easy to give yourself some time to adjust to the difference.
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