Sunline Enduro Off-Road Hand Guards

I needed a set of wraparound hand guards mounted to our Yamaha WR450...and quick. I grabbed a set of Sunline Enduro Off-Road Hand Guards and went to work, picking them because of the universal fitment, which includes brackets for both oversize 1 1/8-inch bars and standard 7/8-inch bars. Well, in about 15 minutes I was done mounting them-a new record for me. After experiencing their simple installation, ingenious features and, in the end, the decent performance of the guards I can say they totally blew me away.

The guards seem very basic in design and utilize a two-piece clamp around the bar area. But the gem in the mounting process is the addition of a swivel located near the innermost end of the hand guard (closest to the center of the bike). This movable point makes it ultra-easy to align the mount and bar together. When you take into consideration the endless routing and locations of brake lines, clutch cables, throttle cables, electrical wires, number plate mounts, triple-clamp attachment hardware and headlight brackets, the pivot point really shows its usefulness. It was the simplest idea to solve what usually turns out to be a bending, rerouting and bolt-stripping affair. The two-piece clamp has a strong bite on the bar and the end piece inserted into the handlebar clamped solidly, too. The plastic shield and its included pre-Loctite-equipped bolts lined up right, and the whole getup looks great.

In use, the hand guards work just as well as any I've tried that are aluminum (personally, I prefer plastic for better bump absorption) and are holding tight and protecting fingers and levers alike. If you hit them hard enough, it's possible to bend or even break the pivot-point bolt but we haven't had that happen yet, and Sunline has beefed it up in later production runs just for prevention. I highly recommend these as a fair deal for the $119 price tag since the kit includes everything you'll need and eliminates a lot of headaches. -Jimmy Lewis