Protect your Tenere 700 engine with Touratech’s Expedition Skid Plate. With a 21” front wheel and good ground clearance, the Yamaha Tenere 700 likes to wander off the beaten path. You are likely to find something on the ground that will make dangerous contact with the underside of your Tenere. You best protect it with an Expedition Skid Plate which offers three levels of protection in one skid plate. The stainless steel base plate distributes the load, while the heavy-duty 4mm aluminum shell provides robust protection. This is capped off by reinforced nylon sliders that absorb impact and provide a sliding surface to glide your Tenere over any obstacle in its path.
TRANSCRIPTION –
Hey folks, Ian here with Touratech USA. Today, we are going to be installing the Expedition Skid Plate on a Yamaha T7. This is the skid plate that uses a bunch of different layers to add reinforcement to the motorcycle. The main component here is your 4mm thick aluminum skid plate, and then you have these two 5mm thick stainless steel plates as the front one. That’s the front one and this is the back one right here. These guys are super strong and what they do is they spread out the load of impacts on the bottom of the skid plate onto the frame that cradles the bottom side of the engine.
The first step I always take doing an install here is to lay out all the hardware that comes in the kit. You have two stainless steel brackets here. These are only used if you do not have Touratech engine crash bars on the motorcycle. So I’m not going to use those today. You have six M8 washers. You have eight of these clip nuts. You have six of these coarse thread screws and six of their corresponding plastic spacers. Those are installed here into these sliders of what you have two. You have a whole bunch of these flange head bolts here, and then there’s two of them that are longer. They’re the exact same bolt, just a little bit longer. Four of these hex head bolts, one M8 nyloc nut and one socket cap and a bolt. So that’s the collection that you should have in your hardware pack, and let’s get straight to work.
The first thing to do is get on your computer and print out the paper instructions. There’s a lot of steps to this installation, so I highly recommend having these handy, not to mention they have the torque specs right here. We’re going to be using the Inox A2, that’s stainless steel, and we’re going to be using these torque specs while we’re working on the bike.
Once we got the instructions printed out, first thing we do is install all these clip nuts into the two sub pieces. You start with the front mounting plate and you install these just by squeezing together and clipping them in. They should be able to slide up and down like this, and they’re installed on the inside of the bracket here. Now we’re going to install these coarse thread screws and their corresponding spacers onto these nylon sliders. These go into the one o’clock… I should say the first, the third and the last position. I do that on both of the spacers. I find these much easier to install using an electric tool. I’ll show you how that works here. These coarse thread screws use a Torx T20 tool. I use the CruzTOOLS drivers on just an electric impact.
You put the screw through the plastic spacer, like so, hold it in place and then just send it down here. You don’t actually want these so tight. So when I do that, I’ll actually then go and back them out about a quarter turn, so that plastic spacer is just floating a little bit. That’ll make it a lot easier to get into the skid plate when we’re doing it at the end. So first position, third position, final position. Now that we’ve got the two sub-parts assembled and the plastic sliders all assembled, it’s time to head over to the motorcycle and start installing these two subframe pieces.
For the front piece, we need the socket cap, M8 bolt, two of the M8 washers and the M8 lock nut as well as two of these M6x20 flange-head bolts. You can see on the instructions here that these flange-head bolts are screwing into the subframe on the motorcycle. So I’m going to put some Loctite on these, and then the M8x30 bolt is going into its own Nyloc nuts. So I’m going to put anti-seize on that one before I head to the bike.
Here we are under the motorcycle ready to install the front sub part and this installs with three bolts. The two lower mounting positions go here and here on the front engine cradle, and then the upper bolt here goes right up in here in this hole that’s cast in the front of the crank case here. So we’re going to bolt it up like that. I’m going to start by just loosely installing these two flange-head bolts by hand, just to hold the bracket in place, and then I’ll work on the top hole. Once you get the top bolt through and we have the two bottom bolts just loosely started, you can take the nyloc nut and another one of the washers here and install it on the back side of the upper bolt.
Now I’m going to use a Torx T30 bit to snug up these two lower bolts and a 6mm Allen drive and a 13mm spanner wrench to tighten up the upper bolt. This upper bolt is a little bit hard to get to because of the shape of the frame. So just make sure you have a good selection of tools to try and make sure you can reach it here. With the front plate installed, now it’s time to work on the rear sub plate. And that requires all four of these longer M8 hex head bolts as well as two of the shorter flange-head bolts. All of these are screwing into the frame of the motorcycle. So I’m going to use thread locker on all six of them. Remember that at this point, if you do not have Touratech lower engine guards on your bike, you will need these spacers to be installed here or here. I’m not quite sure yet. But since our bike already has those on the bike, we are not going to be using these pieces.
So from both sides of the motorcycle, we have to remove the two factory bolts here. These factory bolts use a 12mm head. With those four bolts out, we now hold this plate up and loosely install it with the two big hex head bolts going back here, and then the flange-head bolt going right here on both sides. Make sure you got the washers and some thread locker installed on these bolts. With the three bolts on each side now loosely install, use a Torx T30 bit to screw in the two flange-head bolts, and then use a 13mm socket to screw in the two big bolts on the sides. Now that we have the rear and forward subframe brackets installed underneath the bike, we’re going to install the actual skid plate itself.
To do that, we are going to use the remaining six M6 flange-head bolts and we’re going to put thread locker on all of them because they’re all screwing into those J nuts that we previously installed or those clip nuts. And so we want to make sure that they don’t rattle out. Little blue thread locker. For installing the skid plate under the bike, I like to start with the two front bolts that are going to go into these J nuts here. So hold the plate up with one hand, and with the other hand, just loosely start these bolts into the clip nuts. You’ll notice that I’m not putting any bolts in these front holes right here. That’s because these are used last to secure the nylon reinforcement sliders.
Now the last step is to install these sliders on the bottom side of the skid plate. These are held in place by the little bobbins that you previously installed and the two longer flange-head M6 bolts. I like to put just a little bit of Loctite on both of these guys, and then we’ll use our Torx T30 to drive them home. All right. That’s all there is to it. Skid plate is fully installed. Underside of this motorcycle is now protected way better than stock, and it’s ready to go for a ride.