It seems I hit a nerve with the highway peg issue and I apologize if I pissed anyone off. That definitely was not my intention! When I say it's a "sporty" type of touring bike, though, I mean the inherent riding position Kawasaki intended the rider to be in while riding the bike. Putting your feet up while your body is in this position would cramp your knees just as much as keeping your feet on the pegs, depending on where the pegs were located, unless the bars were way out wide. I don't really want to get into a massive debate about it because there can be no winner and I don't want to offend or **** anyone off. It's all preference here, really. I'm not bashing the idea of highway pegs for this bike and I sincerely hope you guys don't take it that way! I understand people like to stretch out their legs on long rides and I appreciate all ideas and design concepts. I just think built-in highway pegs would add too much cost to the bar while taking away from the aesthetics merely to appease a relatively small niche of riders. For those of you who like highway pegs, clamp-ons should do just fine. That way, you can even remove them if you don't happen to be going on some 8 hour adventure.
I've gone into quite a bit of detail on why we can't remove the rear horizontal bar but if you have some specific questions regarding it I'd be happy to answer them. It's a matter of where the bike hits the ground in a tip over (regardless of speed) as well as a strength issue. The fact of the matter is, without that rear horizontal bar, the farther-back, lower part of the fairing is going to get hit which would make any protection the vertical bar alone can offer obsolete. Maybe it'd help you guys picture what I'm saying if I can get some photos of the bike tilted over a bit? We can play with some ideas on how to alter the rear bar but unfortunately it has to stay.
Also, regarding the issue of the shock affecting the engine mounting points. This is another reason for a 3-point cage. The more points of contact with the bike, the more the shock is distributed. That's the main issue people have with single-point frame sliders. In harder spills they tend to bend the mounting point because all the shock is hitting one single point. However, we've never had an issue with this on our other bars so I don't expect it to be much of an issue with these either.
