I’ve made a few modifications to the Tigger. I love this bike, particularly the motor, but it has to be said that the ergonomics are not as good as on the GS. So, I bought SW Motech 30mm bars risers ( up, but not back ), some wing mirror extenders ( SW Motect again ), a Skidmarx touring screen, some head-lamp relays ( from triumph-online.co.uk, very helpful on the phone btw, will use them again ), Tiger 1050 handguards, and the obligatory ( for me ) Baglux tankbag.

The bar risers are excellent – they almost fix the riding position for me. It’s not completely perfect ( I like my bars fairly straight and pushed quite far forward – and wide – I like yankable bars ) and these are nearly there but I wonder if the GS bars were wider, and possibly higher in relation to the seat. I’m going to measure up some GS bars when I get a chance and do a compare and contrast.

The mirror extenders are great also, they certainly push the mirrors up and out which makes for all the rear view vision you could possibly want, at the expense of making the bike look a little dumbo-like. These’ll stay on though. In contrast to what I had read on some of the forums there is no noticeable effect on buffeting/noise, although to be fair I didn’t really think there would be. Which brings me to the next point…

The Skidmarx screen is better than the stock Triumph screen, but it’s not fixed the noise problem. The buffeting as it is I can pretty much live with ( I don’t want complete isolation from the outside world, that’s why I ride a motorbike ), but the noise, rather than being reduced, has just moved to the back of my helmet rather than all the way round. This could be a result of the Arai Chaser helmet I got free with the bike ( with it’s ‘aero-dynamic’ wing at the back ), or because it’s a new bike and I’m over-sensitive, but I’m expecting to have to revisit the noise issue.

Some crazy new EU law dictates that twin head-lamped motorcycles may not have both lamps on at the same time. Triumph adhere to this law but thoughtfully leave the relay sockets open on their bikes so that the intrepid owner can retro-fit relays to allow both head-lamps to illuminate at the same. Which I did.

I also replaced the stock ‘wind’ guards with more substantial alternatives from the Triumph Tiger 1050. They need a small amount of tweaking to make them fit, I posted here on triumph-rat.net to show how I did it.

It’s inevitable that I was going to be comparing my Tiger with my old R1150GS’s – they are essentially in the same ‘class’ of motorcycle ( giant trailies, monster trailies, whatever… ), and so I have been. A search on Google didn’t reveal many direct comparison tests so I’m going to do my own soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 12:30 and is filed under Tiger 955i. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.