Make a habit of smashing mirrors!?
 

Hi all,

Owned my Honda XR two weeks and already had two smashed mirrors (one my fault). At the cost of 50 usd they are not cheap! Seems rather silly to put such a fragile thing on a dirt bike but then so is putting side stand down in wet sand on a verge and leaving bike unsupervised with silly children, no doubt. My question being should I get used to them breaking and/or take them off when riding offroad?

Cheers,
rtw

Why not buy some cheap universal mirrors off eBay? They'd be a lot cheaper than $50.

Just what I was going to say, a pair for my XR cost £7 or about $12 including postage a couple of weeks ago. They're pretty cheap but do the job.

back in the days when I used to drive a 38ton articulated tipper truck down lanes built for a horse and cart to get to farms I got really pissed off with breaking mirrors, especially the wide angle one, then an old sweat showed me a way to stop breaking them.

Take the mirror out of it's rim. tape across the back with insulating tape in a cross shape, corner to corner, like they do with car headlights on race tracks. The run a bead of tape around the edge of the mirror.

I couldn't believe it would make any difference, but I never broke another mirror from that day on, despite some good hard hits from passing hedgerows!!

I've bust a few on my XR as well. I've now using a small blind spot mirror - the kind you stick on your car wing mirror slightly modified to fix it to the throttle cable housing. It's not perfect but it's good enough and it's lasted for years.

I used to always take them off, but for touring, that really does not work from a legal view. If you want some good dirt and Adventure bike mirrors, I don't think you can do better than these. They work, don't break, and move out of the way when needed, either proactively, or not :)

Doubletake Mirror

The KTM/Husky and Doubletake mirrors work well - they simply fold away from any impact.

There is also a smaller (and lighter) mirror meant for bicycle that have the same idea
Busch & Muller Cycle Star Mirror
Note Busch & Muller make mirrors for BM motorcycles...

I will second double take mirrors as well. Very nice stuff!