Brutale 1090R R&G Tail-Tidy & CRG bar-end mirrors

I just bought an R&G Tail tidy for my 2011 1090R Brutale and spent a couple of hours fitting it last night.

Trooper Lu's in NSW were extremely helpful and sent the unit with blinding speed, so I received it on Tuesday after ordering on Saturday.

Anyway, I followed the instructions and soon had the old unit removed and in pieces. First thing to do was cut the wires to the license plate light and rewire them to the new R&G light, which is a lot smaller. The new light screws onto the tail tidy easily, although I was a bit scared to tighten the nuts too much due to their small size. I think locknuts would have been better.

Next thing was attaching my indicators. Immediately I could see that they were not going to fit without some modification. I had to enlarge the hole in the tail tidy and extend it back, then I had to cut off a couple of millimetres from the bush on the indicators so that the screw could fully tighten against the metal of the mount. Having done that, I routed the wires up through the unit and secured them with one of the supplied cable ties.

There were three allen head bolts, with locknuts, supplied to attach the tail tidy to the frame, but I could only get one of them to go in far enough for the thread to be accessible from the under-seat area. The other two were, frustratingly, just a bee's dick too short. Fortunately I found a couple of slightly longer bolts lying around the workshop, and a couple of locknuts to go with them.

After connecting up the wires for the indicators and license plate light, the last thing to do was drill a couple of holes in the license plate and attach that to the holder.

By comparison, fitting the mirrors was easy. An allen key to remove the existing bar-end sliders, then the rubber insert which was left inside the handlebar. For the 1090R, you need to use the adapters which go inside the handlebars and leave a mount for you to screw on the mirrors. I had to use all the supplied shims to get the required diameter for the adapter to fit inside the handlebars. Lastly you need to remove the old mirrors, which involves undoing the mirrors and then removing the mounting lug from the lever assembly.

It's strange not having those two hulking mirrors in front of you. Actually, it's great! I never liked the mirrors on the Brutale. There was only about a third of the mirror that displayed anything useful, the rest was my arms, and they didn't have enough movement to fully adjust them to my ergonomics. The new ones are brilliant. You can see completely behind you on both sides, and they don't seem to vibrate at all. They are also slightly convex, so I'm having to get used to judging the distance to the vehicles in the mirror. They also flip up or down out of the way when you're filtering through traffic, but I haven't tried that yet.

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