Windshield Selection For Your Motorcycle
By Scott Holton, J&P Tech

Welcome to another edition of Tech Talk. The topic for today is going to be Windshield selection for your American made & Metric Cruiser from Memphis Shades. Very often here at J&P®, we as technicians are asked how to select the proper windshield for a particular application. This is a very subjective matter that requires some thought on the consumer’s part. How much protection do I want? What appearance change am I interested in? Do I want it to detach? What budget do I have? Once we get some answers to these questions we can define what you require. In today’s article we are going to feature the Memphis Shades, our most popular selling windshields.  

Memphis Shades has a variety of smaller windshields available in a wide variety of colors. The Del Rio, Del Ray, El Paso and the Rio Grande are examples of their Sportshield style smaller units. All the Memphis Shades are quick detach (except those Road Kings). The key to understanding how to apply a Memphis Shade is to realize that the windshields are the same in a wide variety of applications. To make it work for you, the appropriate mounting hardware must be purchased. For example, you would like to use a Black Del Rio on your ’03 XVS V-star Custom. 750-289 is the windshield PN, with ZZ75399 as the right hardware to mount it. If I wanted to use the same windshield on a ’03 Dynaglide, I would use the mounting hardware PN 750-430. Same windshield, different hardware.

The customer that requires more protection will be more interested in the Memphis Fat or Slims. Take a look at Figure I. These drawings represent the coverage provided on the Memphis Shades Slims & Fats.

The Memphis Fats are available in 4 different heights to give whatever appearance you desire, Memphis Slims have 2 different heights. Generally accepted practice is for the top of the windshield to be even with the tip of the riders nose. This allows the rider to look over the windshield, but not through it. Of course there are no hard and fast rules regarding this, so if you would like a different height, it’s perfectly acceptable.

Now lets walk through a Memphis Fats/Slims scenario. You have a ‘02 Honda VTX 1300. You have decided to use a Gradient Orange 17 inch Memphis Slim. Looking at the catalog, you see 2 different headlight openings, 7 and 9. So which one is what you require? Looking at the Mounting hardware we need ZZ75119 to mount this, and here we see a note to use a 9-inch cutout. The proper Windshield is PN 750-659 to work in this application.

The examples above should give you an idea of how to select a Memphis Shades windshield, but as always our friendly tech staff is still available to help. All the mounting hardware is made from polished aluminum. Memphis Shades also makes a very fine product manufactured from ICI Lucite plastic, for crystal clear clarity.

If additional protection is desired to keep the wind and noise coming up from the road, Memphis Shades markets Custom Lowers to combat this. These quick detach units follow the lead of their bigger brothers in that the way to make them work is to select the proper hardware for your application. Available in the same colors, this can be the correct finishing touch.