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dbrick wrote:What happened to your icon?

I rearranged Photobucket and haven't gotten around to fixing it..

Quick report - I'm not going to do the full report until I have a good drawing of the spacers I made.

They work. Amazingly well, and very easy to install. Takes about 2-3 minutes to install them. And they'd work on ANY windshield that mounts to the BMW touring mount.

Thanks to Poperr for the genesis of the idea, and thanks to the member here (who will be named if he gives me permission to) who made the two prototype spacers.

The ones I tried space the windshield out 3/4" at the lower mounting points to the bracket. That actually moves the bottom edge out about 1.5" from it's normal position. It also moves the bottom edge of the shield up about 1-1.25", leaving a nice big gap for air to flow up the backside of the shield.

I'm using the shortest original Cee-Bailey shield for my initial tests. I may try some of the larger ones when I have a chance.

The results - the bike feels REALLY planted on the highway. The front end has no tendency to veer, and just feels "planted" - I suspect there is some downforce generated by the shield at this angle that helps with that feeling. I ran it up to about 85MPH for a bit (too many police in NJ to do it for long) and it remained planted feeling. There is NO turbulence on my helmet. None. Zilch. BIG improvement there. My GPS (Nav-IV) which had been overheating and shutting down continued working all day for the first time in weeks - and the ambient temps reached 94F at the peak of the day. If I opened my faceshield a bit - there is no fluttering from it (although being a Schuberth C3, it won't stay opened for long..)

My OBC was telling me silly miles until empty (had 185 miles on the tank, and it told me I had 121 miles remaining.) That may be a flakey fuel strip (it has also read EMPTY several times lately when it wasn't empty - it's being replaced next week), or.. perhaps the MPG is also improved. I added gas at slightly over 200 miles and it took 4 gallons, so 50MPG for both highway and barfing around back roads at 30MPH - not bad.

I was happy enough with the results that I just kept riding all day - finally returning home around 6PM.

More to come - stick around..

OK, a few pics, and a drawing.. These are of the proof-of-concept trial pieces. I have some more ideas that I'd like to try, and will briefly discuss these later.









It's pretty obvious what it is - a simple spacer that fits over the existing threaded boss/stud on the factory windshield bracket, with a hole drilled and tapped the necessary distance away so the hole in the shield lines up with the spacer when the spacer moves the shield out from the windshield bracket.

Roger Lohrey was my co-conspirator in this test, and he kindly machined the test pieces (and made a nice drawing from my doodle of an idea.)

And the drawing:



Note that I also used a spacer I had that fit exactly into the hole in the grommet, and was the right length - so the grommet isn't crushed. The load is taken up by the spacer, and the grommet more or less floats a bit (which is how the original mount to the factory bracket works.) A suitable one could be made from some 3/8" OD tubing pretty easily.

OK - my ideas on refining the design..

- Make it wider so the entire rubber grommet sits on the surface
- Make both ends rounded off - mostly because it will look neater
- Step the two ends on the side facing the windshield so the end that mounts to the bracket is slightly lower then the end the grommet seats on. Currently I had to file a corner off that end that was hitting the windshield due to the complex curvature of the windshield.
- Make the recessed hole for the mount to the bracket big enough (it's ALMOST..) so the stock screws can be used to mount it to the bracket and have the heads recessed.

Nothing too hard - I've just gotta see if Roger can help out again, he's been very generous with his time and providing machining and engineering skill.

NIce work, Don.

David, even better is yet to come. Roger and I have been redesigning it a bit..

OK, I promised more and better, so here is a photo of the end result (still needs to be fine finished and painted to match the bracket):



It's a two piece design:



That go together like:



The round T shaped bit goes into the grommets on the shield, and then a bolt goes through (using the standard grommet spacer) and bolts the two parts together. The larger oval piece goes over the threaded stud on the windshield bracket, and is bolted to it using the stock windshield screw.



The result is:



Thanks MUCH to Roger Lohrey who made up these pieces for me, and added some finesse to the design. This design is useable with both the original touring mount and the newer one used on '11 bikes and newer. The bottom edge of the windshield is moved out about 1.5". That seems to work very well with the original Cee-Bailey windshields. I haven't tried it with any others (the new style - III - Cee-Bailey left with the old bike.) Since I prefer minimal windshield, just enough to take the pressure off my chest and give me a bit of rain protection, this seems the optimal design. I do have a larger original Cee-Bailey that I sometimes put on in the winter (and sometimes not..)

If anyone wants plans - ping me with your email address and I can send you a PDF of the plan as done by Roger.