I bought my Kawasaki Versys new in 2009. It's been a great motorcycle, but it didn't take long to discover a few things that needed improving or a few problems to be solved. Here are three of the fixes I've done.
- The mirrors were terrible. First, they're too short (or not set far enough out). When you look in the mirrors, all you see is your shoulders. And they vibrate like crazy, making it impossible to see details of what's going on behind you! Early on I bought a couple of mirror extenders from http://www.motowerk.com/. That fixed it so I could see traffic behind me and not just my shoulders, but the vibration problem still was there. The solution for the vibration was to replace the mirrors. I picked up a pair of Aprilia mirrors locally for about $24 each (a real deal - way less than Kawasaki wanted for mirrors for any model motorcycle).
- After the first season of riding my Versys it developed a terrible buzz/vibration coming from somewhere up front. Reading the forums, it was apparent this was "normal" for this bike. I found that pressing on the cowling around the headlight reduced it (which was one of the commonly mentioned buzz points). Again, at the recommendation of several riders on the forums, I took all the cowling off and put a thin self-sticking foam insulation (picked up from the local hardware store) everywhere the cowling touched or almost touched the frame or another piece of cowling. Buzz fixed!
- The reset button in the instrument cluster is another failure point. Very frustrating to not be able to reset my trip odometer or set the clock! Again, the forums identified the problem (or multiple problems) - and had a solution. Take the instrument cluster off the bike, dismantle it enough to get to the bottom of the circuit board, and then use contact cleaner on the switches. It looks like they're enclosed and the contact cleaner won't get into the switch, but apparently it does get into the right area and doing this solved my problem. A year later, and the switches still work reliably.
There are more things on my list I'd like to do, but these were the frustrating little design flaws that were easy to resolve. (I hope Kawasaki is listening.)
Gary
