Floorboards

[Gadzooks Mike]

I've been obsessing about floorboards nearly as long as I've had my little GZ, and yesterday I finally did something about it. I had gone down to the local dealer - they sell both Honda and Suzuki - to see if they had anything close to fitting a GZ that wouldn't take much modification. I came home with a pair of passenger floorboards for a VL800 Intruder. The Suzuki part number is 99950-70278.





The bracket, however, is too wide to fit where the peg fits, and the bracket must be shaved off.





I removed the floorboard from the bracket (2 bolts on the bottom) and used a bench grinder to shave down the bracket so it would fit the peg mounting. Then I repainted the now shiney portion of the bracket so it matched the black of the rest of the bracket. Here's a comparison of one finished bracket and one original.





Reattach the board to the bracket. I used a dab of LockTite to make sure nothing vibrates loose.

The pegs are easy to remove. There's a circlip at the bottom of the mounting bracket that must be removed (don't lose it!) and then you remove the small peg which runs through the bracket. Remove the peg and mount the board using the original mounting peg and circlip.






Now there wasn't enough room between the front of the board and the shifter for me to stick my toe in to shift. (Honey? Can I have a heel/toe shifter for my birthday?) I fixed this by raising slightly the shifter. There's a small bolt to remove, then pull the clamp off, arrange it where it needs to be, and slide it back on. You can check it before you put the bolt back. I couldn't find a good pointer, so I'm using an orange paint stick as a pointer to it.




Now there's room enough.





Right now, these boards do NOT tilt up like the original pegs do. The bottom of the bracket is square and not rounded. However, it would be easy to make them tilt up by simply griding the bottom corners round and taking a bit off the top to give some clearance. I will probably do this later. I also didn't take any clearance measurements, and apologize for that. I'll take care of that as well in a later post.

Yes, they're comfortable!! Just wish I had that heel/toe shifter....