Buying and fitting an Indian bought mudguard for 650SS

I recently bought a plain steel rear mudguard form Royal Crusaders who avertise on e-bay. It arrived last Friday and as there has been a lot of discussion with regard to quality and fitting I thought I would relate my experience. I ordered a guard with no holes in it and but asked for the cable clips to be fitted. The reason I asked for no holes was that I could see from the pictures on e-bay that the holes drilled in the standard supplied guard were not in the same place as my original guard.

On recieving the guard the first thing I did was to stand it next to my original and my first thoughts were that it was slightly longer and the cross section was not as rounded but appeared to be slighly more square. My next step was to start the fitting process and to do this I used the indentation for the frame tube above the swinging arm as a datum point and marked the centre line of the guard along its length. From here I drilled the two front centre line bolt holes that fit the guard to the frame by measuring the distance from the centre of the indent to the hole centres. I then found that the guard would not line up with the holes and I had to remove 10mm approx of metal from the cut out and bend it back to clear the chainguard. The holes now lined up with the centre brackets. Bending the metal did give me a further problem as the guard is made from 3 sections and it split slightly were the weld was. I will need to get this rewelded. A this stage I had to remove some metal from the front of the guard to ensure it cleared any movement of the swinging arm.

Now the guard was fitted centrally at the front I fitted the rear wheel in position making sure it was central in the frame and used this to centralise the rear of the guard. From here it was possible to centralise the wheel with the rear tyre and positon the height to enable the main support bolt positions to be marked . While doing this I placed the seat back on to make sure it rested on the guard OK.The guard was then removed, the holes drilled, the guard replaced and bolted up with the lifting rails in position. From here it was easy to mark and drill the other two holes for the lifting rails. While carrying out these actions I kept checking the guard position for centre against the tyre position.

All that was left to do was to drill the holes for the number plate, the seat locking bolt position, and the cable entry and exit holes. Luckily I had a spring for the zuise bolt to lock too so I also drilled the holes for these and rivetted the spring to the guard through a small strengthening plate. I also made strenghtening plates out of 2mm thick plate for the main bolt holes and the lifting handle bolt holes. I will have to get these all welded in before chroming.

As I progressed the work and started fitting all the bits, the guard started to look OK but I must admit I was not sure at different stages but I think this was me being picky.

In conclusion at this stage I would say the quality of the guard is good and of a heavier gauge. The guy in India said if I could send him my old guard he would copy it but I was reluctant to do this however if I did I think he would do a good job and there would be less fitting for me.

I hope this is clear and helps some of you who may be considering buying guards from India.

Eric Foulkes