Our adventure ride to the Arctic!: Terry's "Excalibur" receives some bolt-on's

Today brought two mod’s to “Excalibur”, and both of them brought to you by way of Touratech’s online store. The first aftermarket install was to protect the headlight from flying gravel and hitting helicopter sized mosquitos. While the second modification was an attempt at fortifying the rear brake reservoir, which is housed in an area where I’m sure to smash it off in a right side emergency dismount. Although I love my KTM, “Race Ready” must mean “missing any useable guards” because I’ve felt the need to replace all of them plus add more on both of my KTM’s.

Both parts are Touratech and were honestly SUPER easy to put on (that’s like easy, but with a cape). The Brake Cylinder Guard took less than five minutes to put on. It included two spacers, the guard itself and a bolt.

The second install was the addition of Touratech’s Clear Makrolon Headlight Guard. This install took a little bit longer, but truly not much longer. I was afraid however, that things weren’t going to line up. And if you hold the brackets up against the preexisting holes in the windscreen it doesn’t line up, but don’t fret. During the installation I was EXTREMELY tempted to bend the brackets to where I thought it would line up. DON’T DO THAT!! Once everything was put together it lined up like a champ and popped right into place. Pop!

This evening I also got the opportunity to try out one of my Christmas presents from my amazing wife. She gave me a Brunton Pulse 1500, which retails around 30 bucks. Since I have more phones than a drug dealer sometimes, my wife thought it appropriate to get me a small yet useful backup battery charger. Tonight, I let my iPhone 5S go dead. How dead? Dead, dead. I plugged my iPhone charging cable into the slick, hidden USB port and wallah! Charging. The one downer of the Brunton Pulse 1500 is that it doesn’t come with instructions and Brunton doesn’t provided instructions online either, which drove my father-in-law absolutely bonkers (as he got one in his stocking too). The lack of instructions wouldn’t be so problematic as the device is rather simple to use except the USB plug for charging doesn’t look like a traditional USB plug. It’s a USB plug without the metal housing around it. It sounds obvious, but it wasn’t for me, at least not immediately. Also, the device does not come with a power block to plug into the wall. Thankfully, we have as many Apple products as we have dishes at our house, so stealing an extra power block was easy. Although the device didn’t fully charge my iPhone, it easily brought it back to life at around 65%.

-Terry