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Completed 900 km on my Aprilia Tuareg 660: Ownership experience so far

22nd January 2024, 13:39 by Utkarsh Chaudhary

The motorcycle has been running pretty flawlessly. On the accessories front, I have installed an R&G swingarm protection slider.

BHPian praful recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Running in Update - 900 Kms

With the December vacation period and general slowdown at work, I found time to catch up on my running in. I do not yet have the time to take a couple of days off for a ride, but that is in the pipeline. I have managed to do a few different half-day/couple-hour trips. I have nothing significant to report so far. The bike has been running pretty flawlessly so far. There is a bit of a hiccup between 3-4K rpm, but I know that there is a software update that I will get during the first service that will fix that issue.

On the accessories front, I have installed an R&G swingarm protection slider, the R&G front fork slider did not fit as Aprilia changed the size of the bolt sometime and there is a new model, but nobody in France has it. So I have ordered a Puig front fork slider now, which I will install once it arrives.

I have also received, my Hepco & Beck crash bars, but I ran into some trouble during the installation. One of the bolts that I needed to take out to change the position of the horn started to shear. I did not want to make it worse, so I will attempt to install that some other weekend.

There is an issue that I already saw during my test ride as well as a lot of wind buffeting catching my helmet and this is an issue once I get onto the faster highways (still limited to 130 Kmph), it gets worse if it is a windy day. For now, I have ordered a Puig windscreen extension that I can clip-on to the existing windscreen which should help reduce some of the wind buffeting. If it does not work, I will order a touring windscreen from Puig.

This has also been my first cold-weather riding experience (not counting my ride to Ladakh in 2009 as it wasn't consistently cold), the heated grips are certainly helping a bit. But I had to upgrade to intermediate winter gloves, I could not go to full winter gloves as then my heated grips would be rendered use-less more or less. The next thing on the bucket list is to get the barkbuster handguards that are larger than OEM so theoretically should offer more wind protection. With my current setup, if I spend more than an hour on the highway, and ambient temp is below 7°C I still end up with at least 2-3 fingers going completely numb. Also need to consider getting heated socks as my feet are super cold as well.

Current odometer stands 899 Kms, I will be booking my first service for end Jan/early Feb, after that I can open up the bike a bit more I hope.

Here are some pictures from different rides done through December, where I did some 750 kms of riding. It is big considering till December I had barely done 150 kms. Also if I think back in my Pulsar days back in 2007, by the end of month 3 I was already at around 4000 km.

Here are a few pictures from different locations in the Ile-de-france region, I am trying to find as many forest and hilly roads as possible, but that's quite limited around here.