Who We Are •A Few Words About Sliders• Design Philosophy • Materials • Breadth of Product Line About Us / Who We Are   At RhinoMoto we’re engineers, we’re former club racers, and most importantly, we ride. We’re not a machine shop that is looking for new ways to keep our machines busy. We are an engineering company focused on crash protection products for sportbikes. Our designs come from years of experience both on and off the track. We believe in our products enough that we use them on our personal motorcycles.   They have a term for this in the software industry, where they say, “We eat our own dog food”.   What this means is that we build every part as if it has to protect our own motorcycles, because they do. We invite you to check out the pages in this section to get to know us and our philosophies. If you think the way we design our products makes sense, then our parts are for you.   A Few Words About Sliders   Sliders are not designed to be, nor can they be, complete protection for a motorcycle. No legitimate slider manufacturer will tell you that they can protect your motorcycle in all cases. Motorcycle crashes are complex and unpredictable events. There are so many variables involved that it is virtually impossible to design protection that guarantees your bike will not be damaged when it goes down.   We tend to think of sliders as insurance. You pay for this insurance in the hope that the sliders will reduce the amount of the damage you sustain in a crash by more than the cost of the sliders themselves. In our experience this is true more times than it is not. Sliders are most beneficial in 2 scenarios:   • They can protect your bike from most damage during a low-speed fall. We’ve all had these happen, or almost happen, to us. Your foot slips on oil or loose soil on the ground when coming to a stop. Or for some reason you need to grab a handful of brake while your front tire is on gravel and it washes out. Sliders will keep your frame, rims, forks and swingarm off the ground so that you aren't replacing a lot expensive parts because of a silly mistake.   • If you’re unfortunate to have a high-speed crash, sliders can be the difference between being able to repair your bike and continue with your track day/race weekend or having to pack up and go home. Will your bike get damaged in a high-speed crash? Almost certainly, but the damage will be greatly reduced through of the use of sliders.   Design Philosophy   Every RhinoMoto product is designed for a specific function on a specific motorcycle. We don’t take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to product design. Frankly, this means that we have a lot of tooling and part numbers to deal with, but we feel it is the best way to give you parts that fit your motorcycle well and offer the most protection. Even though the parts vary from motorcycle to motorcycle, we use consistent design elements so that all of the kits look like they were designed by the same company.   Materials   That material that our parts are machined out of is only one piece of the total picture, but it is an important piece. We constantly evaluate the materials available to us to ensure that we are using the best possible materials for the application. The parts that make contact during impact are currently machined out of virgin ABS rod.   We originally felt that ABS was a good choice because it has high impact resistance and hardness specifications as well as being rated for prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light. The plastic parts in our sliders will provide as much protection after they have been on your bike for years as they do on the day you install them.   We have recently revisited the polymer alternatives while designing supermoto foot peg sliders. These sliders are designed to contact the ground as a normal course of their life rather than just in crashes like the rest of our sliders. This meant that we needed to find the polymer with the highest possible abrasion resistance without sacrificing impact resistance. We are currently testing various grades of ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMW), one of which has UV inhibitors added. We plan to make a change to this material if it performs as well as the specifications indicate.   One final note about polymers is that we always use virgin material extruded by the polymer manufacturer itself. There are other grades of plastics available and shapes that have been extruded by companies other than the polymer manufacturer, but we know exactly what we are getting when we buy virgin rod stock right from the people that are making the raw pellets.   We machine our frame slider supports and barend bodies from billet aluminum or stainless steel. We machine our metal parts from solid billets because they are inherently stronger than castings.   Breadth of Product Line   Nothing is more frustrating than finding that aftermarket parts are not available for your motorcycle. Some parts manufacturers want to make parts for only the most popular bikes and sell a lot of a few part numbers. Others are spin-offs of racing teams that are offering parts for sale that they have developed for their race bikes. They won’t have products for you unless you happen to ride the bike that they race.   We do offer parts for the popular bikes, but our product strategy also includes making parts that other manufacturers may choose not to make for whatever reason. There will always be design limitations that mean we won’t be able to offer a class of product for certain models, but we will usually make it if it can be made.   Contact us if your dealer doesn’t have the part you’re looking for. We are in the process of releasing multiple kits to production at any given time, so chances are we’re already working on it.