I know I am not the only Virago owner who has found very little room in the stock headlight bucket to add any new circuitry, such as for the voltmeter that I added between the instrument pods and the wiring for my GPS. To gain more room, I removed the stock headlight assembly and replaced it with a ...

Joe - where did you read that Battery Tenders overcharge / don't shut off? I've used them for many years with no apparent problems.

Dave

You can test float level shutoff on both sides with the carbs on the bike, but if it's off spec on the right carb (at least for Mikunis; I have no experience with the earlier Hitachis), the carbs have to come off the bike to make any adjustment - it's not possible to remove the bowl (and thus the fl...

Made this from a section of scrap handlebar. Attaches to Virago handlebar with the parallel pipe clamp shown in the pic - got this on eBay cuz no plumbing supply houses anywhere near me had such a clamp. There's a strip of sheet rubber cut to the width of the clamp, long enough for a three-layer wra...

I'd like to do that, Joe - it didn't work out last year for me, but we should get a date set yet this August or Sep.

As an alternative to the "kinda ugly" 14mm m/c from my XS650, I got a good one off a Yamaha FZ1, complete with lever. Installation was somewhat more involved than for the XS650 unit (which truly was "plug-'n'-play"), because the FZ1 brake switch wiring has different terminals at the m/c end and goes...

good find, Joe!

Joe, while I haven't looked, I doubt that there's a commercially available adapter plate to mount these Brembo calipers (which come off Ducati Monster's) on a Virago. These Ducati's had dual-disc front brakes, so both RH and LH calipers are available. It probably would be pretty straightforward to d...

The 4-piston Brembo_RH side.JPG Brembo has more "gripping" power than the single-piston caliper on the late XS650's - it's a fairly common upgrade, to the point where there are several commercial sources for the adapter plate needed to mount the Brembo caliper on the right lower fork. Truthfully, wh...