I recently took another look at the crash bar sliders that came with the Adventure Spec crash bars for my T700. Have to say they’re not great! Very thin plastic and nasty little screws, they filled me with zero confidence so I decided to replace them. After some hunting I decided on this set of four from Amazon and on arrival they looked very decent compared with the AS tat. 
They also felt considerably heavier so I weighed them both. First the AS:
Next the new unbranded Amazon blocks:
Yep, 30 grams versus 101 grams. Big difference and that really shows in the feel and quality. I’m guessing AS were trying to keep the weight down to a minimum as that’s rather the selling point of their lightweight aluminium crash bars but I honestly think their stock sliders would offer little or no assistance in a heavy fall, so they’re maybe defeating the object.. The unbranded Amazon blocks are made from a nylon polymer that’s much more robust than the plastic AS ones.
Next it was time to install the new slider blocks and I’d set aside about 20 minutes to get the four blocks in situ. “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley”, said our Rabbie and his famous words were appropriate once again.. The small but correctable problem is caused by these blocks being adaptable to 3 bar diameters (22/25 & 28mm). If you’ve 28mm bars you probably don’t need to worry but smaller than 28mm and you get this problem:
Some may not worry about that but my OCD kicked in immediately as the final look was a bit DIY for my liking. There was also another problem that concerned me. Most crash bars are designed to bend so as not to break the mounting points and the AS bars are no exception. In a heavy fall they will bend inwards towards the panels and tank and I’m not overly keen on the idea of 8 protruding bolts piercing an expensive panel of even wrecking my equally expensive decals! Something had to be done and that something basically involved shortening 16 bolts by circa 5mm. I also replaced the standard nuts for nylock nuts so I wouldn’t have to keep checking them.
Once done the result looked very different and my tank panels were no longer in danger.
So 20 mins turned into a couple of hours but the job was done right and my OCD alleviated!
Would I recommend these sliders? Yes, I would. They’re considerably better quality and look up to the job they’re intended to do. Just don’t plan on a 20 minute install if your crash bars are 25mm or below and you’re anal!
