Oxford Motorcycle Heated Grips.

There comes a time when you just have to change your sticky old Oxford adventure motorcycle heated grips.

My original Daytona brand heated grips last between 2003 and 2016, when the electrical filaments began to show through the rubber.

At the time I was near Port Angeles in the north of Washington, USA. There were no Daytona grips in the local bike shop, so I settled for the Oxford brand.

They were dead easy to fit ans had more buttons for controlling the heat, and I needed the heat because soon I would be heading north to Canada.

These grips have more steps of control and were much more stable at delivering the heat. I was kept warm with the combination of these grips and the handlebar muffs all the way to Inuvik, Canada and back.

However, 4 years later down the road, after passing through New Zealand, Australia, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, I was now in Cambodia, finding that my gloves were getting stuck to the grips.

I took off my handlebar muffs, which are good for protecting the instruments from the sun too, only to find that the grips were caked in sticky nastiness, deformed from old age and perhaps the heat they had endured in all the hot countries I had been travelling in.

Yuk!

For a set of grips that are supposed to be for adventure touring, I was expecting far longer use out of them. That's only 4 years of carefree operation compared to the 13 years I got from my previous model grips. Minus 1 for structure longevity.

I was a bit embarrassed too, since the bike had been in the care of a workshop for a while, who may have been repulsed by the prospect of having to touch these revolting grips.

I scoured Cambodia for heated grips, but unsurprisingly didn't find any in a country that is 35-38C every day.

In the end I had to order online and wait a few weeks for the replacement to arrive. If Daytona had more heat steps on their models, I would probably go with another pair of those since they are harder wearing.

So once again I purchased the near but not quite perfect grips Oxford Advanced Adventure Heated Grips. I just hope the "advanced" bit means improved structure longevity.

The old grips had to be cut, crushed and torn to be removed. Jabbing a screwdriver between the grip and the slider gave the best stripping leverage.

I spent quite a lot of time slicing off ridges of plastic on the slider, and sanding them down repeatedly. After many failed attempts of not being able to slide the new grip on completely, only just being able to pull off again to retry before superglue set in, one last iteration of whittling the slider with a sharp knife, finally did the job.

Now the grips look smart again, and my gloves no longer get stuck to the grips. I'll not bother connecting them to the battery until I get all the way over to northern India. So it'll be awhile before I can appreciate having them.

Hopefully they won't melt into a squishy sticky mess like the last pair.

Which heated grips do other people use ?