Touratech DEFENSA Handguards are engineered tough with a forged aluminum exoskeleton structure and integrated plastic shields designed to provide durable protection for riders and levers.
High-strength aircraft-grade aluminum is forged for strength and maximum impact resistance while having a modern angular design with a textured matte finish. The structure is designed to provide plenty of clearance for stock or aftermarket levers providing an uninhibited range of motion. This aluminum guard is available as ‘Defensa Core’.
Further protection and rider comfort are provided with an optional integrated plastic shield structure that slides over the aluminum and is secured by bolts. This configuration ‘Defensa Expedition’ is ideal for deflecting foliage on a brushy trail or protecting hands from flying rocks or gravel. It also protects riders from rain and cold air which boosts comfort on cooler rides. Additional coverage can be added with the Defensa Spoilers.
All Defensa handguard systems come with bike-specific mounting kits that provide riders with everything needed for clean mounting to the bike. The plastic shields are available in either black or white.
Your adventure motorcycle levers are perhaps the most important controls you have, protect them with Touratech DEFENSA Handguards.
Video Transcript Below:
Hello, I’m Ian with Touratech USA, and this is going to be your installation video for the Touratech Defensa handguards. I’m going to be installing the Defensa Expedition version handguards, and these are going to be going onto a KTM 790 Adventure R that’s one of our shop bikes right now.
This particular kit of Defensa handguards is applicable to basically all of the Husqvarna and KTM Adventure bikes from the 690 to the 1290. There might be a couple of holes in there, but we’ll have it all laid out on the website.
The installation’s pretty straightforward, but I highly recommend printing off the PDF instructions from the website for this, because there are a lot of little pieces and it just makes it a lot easier to be able to visualize them before we get started on the install.
This particular bike that I’m working on had a different older set of Touratech handguards on it, which I’ve already removed. I’m not going to be covering how to remove of your standard handguards from the bike. There’s not much to it, just a few bolts to pop the stock ones off, and then you get started on these.
Without further ado, let’s get to it. I’ve got the parts laid out and we can go through what we’re looking at. Here we have the kit all laid out, and these are the tools that I expect I’m going to be needing to use. Again, print off the instructions here. These are super important, because you see these clamps have a whole bunch of little pieces. So it’ll make our jobs a lot easier to have this visual reference. And then also the hardware, I’ve got it all laid out here and kind of split down the middle. That way I make sure I have one of everything, you know, there’s nothing missing from either side of the box. We should be all ready to start.
The first thing that I like to do on these installations, because this is the expedition kit, is I’m going to install the plastic covers on the crossbars here. The crossbars are identical. There’s no right or left. The right or left is on the actual plastic pieces. So just pick one and slide it together like this. And then we’ll put one screw here in each bar just to hold the plastic piece on until it gets pinched down over here. That’s going to be step one. Use the really course-thread Torx drive screw, install them like this.
All right, next step I like to do is loosely install the connecting arm here. It fits on the backside like this and these ones are pretty easy to line up to because you see we’ve got the logo facing up here and then the connecting arm has its own Touratech logo on the side here. We’ll do it like that and just loosely install the bolts. For this, we’re going to use the two flange head Torx bolts and two of the M6 Nyloc nuts. All right, those two are now ready to go.
To assemble these clamps, you have to actually press these pins right here and you have to get them into the lower part of this clamp. Because of the coating on these, it’s sometimes a little difficult to get these through the clamp so you can either take a pick and just clear out any of the extra coating or what you can do is use a pair of pliers and press it in there gently, and then actually put a nut over the other side so you can squeeze on the pliers and get it centered. You can see I’ve already done that with this one here. I just pressed it in with a pair of pliers. And once you’ve done that, you can take the two clamp pieces and they hold together like this. When you’ve got one clamp ready to go, we’ll head over to the bike.
But before we do that, we want to grab … There’s two Hex head bolts of different lengths in the kit. There’s a small one and a big one, long one short one. So you’re going to take the small head longer bolt, you’re going to drop it through this hole right here, and then assemble a clamp like that. Then we can head over to the bike.
Over here at the bike, we’re just going to really loosely install this, just for it to kind of hold its position here. For the final install, we do want this set up so that this bolt is coming out of the top here. So just slide it over, let it sit like that for now.
All right, when you’re over here on the bike, you’re going to take the clamp piece here and put it down so it locks over like this, and now you take the cone, the conical washer and you take the concave side, put it down like this against the top of that clamp piece. And then you take your acorn nut and screw it down gently here. And again, you want these nice and loose so that you can move things around still as we’re positioning everything. We’ve got a clamp assembled, just resting here on the bike.
Okay. We are working on the brake lever side first, so we’ll grab the brake lever side handguards. You can tell because the logo is up and the logo is up. We can assemble the outer end by taking the long socket-cap bolt and this kind of shouldered washer, drop that through. Then it drops in here into the end of the handguard. Then you take this quill spacer and the expanding nut. I just like to thread them down until they’re just about touching like that. And then we can drop it onto the bike just by sliding it into the end of the handguard here, into the handlebar. Now we can start assembling here on the inner end.
For the inner clamp, we’ve got these two brackets and they are obviously left and right. If you look at the diagram here, you can see that this one is for the clutch lever side and this is opposite. So, this is for the brake lever side. We’ll take this and the remaining large socket-cap bolt, shorter flange head bolt, and the last large acorn nut and then carry them over to the bike.
We’ll use the Hex head bolt and put it through here to the top clamp where it swivels. Just start that one real loose, lots of room to work with. And then on the inner end of the handguard here, we use the flange head bolt and the acorn nut goes on the inside. All right, this is all very loosely installed.
Now we can start tightening everything up here to get it all situated. I personally like to start with the outer side of the handguard just because that’s a fixed position and we want it popped in all the way there. So we’ll start that with the Allen wrench. And this is a 6mm Allen wrench. Now I’m going to move to these two bolts right here. Those are going to use Torx t30s.
Now we move to the inner clamp and we just get everything lined up. There’s obviously a lot of swiveling here that we can do. And the idea is you want to have as much clearance as possible with all the break lines and wires before we tighten anything down hard. The next one I’m going to do is going to be the top hat here. Now the next one. The next one I’m going to do here is going to be the 10mm Hex head bolt that is at the inner surface of this clamp right here.
Now I’m going to tighten up this bolt here at the inner part of the clamp. You’re going to need your 10mm wrench and your Torx t30. Now, we’re going to work on the inner clamp since we’ve got all the other things pretty much tight. First thing is tighten this main clamp here to lock down the position of the inner clamp. It does not take much torque because it’s just a friction fit here. And then when you’re happy with all the angles, we’re going to tighten up the acorn nut on the top of this here with the 8mm. And last thing we’re going to come through and tighten up this 6mm bolt on the handlebar clamp end.
Now, everything on this side is locked down. So we will get to work on the clutch side. Everything is exactly the same, just a mirror operation so I’m not really going to talk through it.
Okay, thanks for watching. That’s the install of the Defensa Expedition handguards on our KTM 790 Adventure R. Hope you learned something. The install’s not too bad and the things look fantastic when they’re mounted on the motorcycle.
As you can see, there’s tons of clearance for both of the levers. Throttle works perfectly smooth. And you’ve got decent weather protection afforded at the front end there.
We do also make an additional set of spoilers that extend the weather protection up about an inch and a half on the top. I haven’t done an install video on those, but it’s just two screws that go right on.
If you’ve got any more questions about parts we make for your motorcycle, please visit our website, touratech-usa.com. And if you like this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more just like it. (silence)
