J-Pegs and how to prevent damages with them

x

Many LT riders have installed the J-Pegs in order to be able to stretch their legs during long rides. The original J-Pegs turned out to be somewhat too close for the longer legged riders so the manufacturer came up with their "XL" model. This improved model takes the foot rest position further forward and works fine in this respect.
BUT...if you ever drop your bike with the J-Peg XL model you will have BIG problems. The free end of the J-Peg will punch a nasty hole in your lower fairing!

When I purchased my J-Peg XL's back in 2004 I had already read the reports of the damages some riders have encountered. And I knew that I was going to drop my bike sooner or later again. I had dropped it already two or three times by then, the first incident was actually 30 minutes after I picked it from the dealer. But that is another story...

EDIT: I will add here my recent proof of this modification. I dropped the LT and Uni-Go recently (Aug 2020) at speed of 60-70 km/h due to a wet left curve and too high speed. (My bad...) The following footage was taken by a car that arrived on the scene about one or two minutes after us. There I was already unhooking the Uni-Go before lifting the bike. You can see that the rig had turned over 180 degrees while sliding on the asphalt. (FYI my wife and I were ok after this, we had the rain gear on top of the BMW Atlantis leather suits and even our rain gear was intact, the wet and slippery asphalt helped...)

 

Here you can see the J-Peg XL that has lost quite a bit of material from it's elbow. Also the left footpeg was lost.  J-Peg protected my led equipped plastic bumpers, Also all my additional lights as well as other farkles were intact.

The damage to the side case is here. All the paint is ok. Just the chrome trim and the vinyl cover (which I had installed back in 2006 to cover the already slightly damaged chrome itself) were damaged. A future winter project to fix this... 

And this was the damage to the Uni-Go. Easy to smoothen and repaint as it is on the low part of the side panel.

The below picture show the J-Peg XL after the asphalt reshaped it and the two other pictures were after I worked 15 minutes on it. Angle grinder with sandpaper wheel and some spray paint...

Here the J-Peg is back in place after my fixing. Note the fog light and daylight running light sticking out and unharmed!

This is what happened to my Suburban Machinery footpeg relocator. This protected the shifter plate! All I need for this is the new foot peg which was kindly donated to me by my good Latvian friend Aigars S.

So the following pictures  (from 2005) show the recipe for making the J-Peg XL's as your new "LT side protectors". They work practically 100% in zero speed droppings and now they have been tested also in higher speeds...

Here is my solution to prevent damages to the bike in case you drop the bike. I call the the
J-Peg Stopper.

I made the stopper out of some 20 x 3 mm flat steel that I happened to have laying around. The stopper is welded in the bikes subframe which can easily be removed by loosening the two bolts.

Here is the subframe upside down and this shows my first version of the stopper. This version was missing the little notch at the end of stopper. The purpose of this to prevent the J-Peg end bending upwards in case the bike falls down and the J-Peg is pressed against the stopper.

Here is the final version already painted.

The stopper in place.

                           

This much plastic must be trimmed off from the lower fairing to accommodate the stopper. 

My J-Peg stoppers have been tested in real life maybe four times at least. The picture below was taken 15 years later than the previous ones and it shows some scratches on the J-Peg elbow. The best thing is however, that the J-Peg XL actually acts a bumper and prevents my LED-equipped original plastic bumper covers from being damaged ;-)