Auxilliary Fuel, Luggage Rack and Soft Luggage.
One of the issues I had with my old Vstrom was the final weight of bike with gear. The wet weight of the OEM motorcycle is #502. I removed #42 from the bike but added #103 in new additions and changes. Additionally my gear and 5.4 gallons of auxilliary fuel weighed almost #87 bringing the total wet weight up to a whopping #650. To make matters worse the aux fuel hovered above the pillon seat weight so it was being carried very high. This was a design I really wanted to change on the rebuild.
I decided to go with a custom made rack to get the aux fuel down lower. I would use the tank from my CBRXX which holds only about 4 gallons and go with soft luggage to save the weight of the Happy Trails hard bags and very sturdy steel rack. Just to cut to the chase, when I completed the project and cut WAY back on my gear (Hey I no longer had 146 liters of luggage space that would get filled one way or another) the resultant bike had a wet weight of approximately #591 when ready to Rally. That is a savings of almost #60 and very significant in a long multiday activity when you are getting tired.
I started by cutting the seat in 1/2 as described before and then I trimmed the rear tail cover to allow for a square platform to be placed in between the riders seat and the tail cone. This still allowed (and left remaining) the tabs to tuck in the rear side panels for assembly to provide a finished look. You saw before How the rear platform was mocked up for fit. Finally I made a mock-up out of 1/4" pressboard and took that to a local fabrication house to have a platform stamped out of 14 ga steel. The resulting Item looked like this:
Next was the luggage rack to hold the soft bags. The bags I chose were available from Aerostitch and have attachments on the backside for hooking them easily to a rail sustem no larger than .75" diameter. Using 5/8" tubing we (Jesse Jiminez, my neighbor who has great mechanical skills, and I who can hold the metal for him while he cuts) bent hoops that would accomodate the luggage and then made structural pieces to cross over the top of the Vstrom rear tail cone (between the cone and the platform) which would be held in place by the bolts that hold the tailcone and the forward attachment points for the standard OEM rack. You can see in these pictures how it all worked:
Of course the platform attached to the bike by using the holes in the rear tail cone to bolt through to the subframe (with the luggage crossmember underneath it) and the forward end used the pillon seat attachment with the key release. The resulting Item held the luggage much closer to the bike, was light and while it looks prety wimpy I have dropped the bike (several times) on either side without bending these hoops and once I had to pick up the bike by grabbing the aux fuel tank that is attached to the platform and had no problem there either (I'm simply not easy on my rally equipment).
One of the issues I had with my old Vstrom was the final weight of bike with gear. The wet weight of the OEM motorcycle is #502. I removed #42 from the bike but added #103 in new additions and changes. Additionally my gear and 5.4 gallons of auxilliary fuel weighed almost #87 bringing the total wet weight up to a whopping #650. To make matters worse the aux fuel hovered above the pillon seat weight so it was being carried very high. This was a design I really wanted to change on the rebuild.
I decided to go with a custom made rack to get the aux fuel down lower. I would use the tank from my CBRXX which holds only about 4 gallons and go with soft luggage to save the weight of the Happy Trails hard bags and very sturdy steel rack. Just to cut to the chase, when I completed the project and cut WAY back on my gear (Hey I no longer had 146 liters of luggage space that would get filled one way or another) the resultant bike had a wet weight of approximately #591 when ready to Rally. That is a savings of almost #60 and very significant in a long multiday activity when you are getting tired.
I started by cutting the seat in 1/2 as described before and then I trimmed the rear tail cover to allow for a square platform to be placed in between the riders seat and the tail cone. This still allowed (and left remaining) the tabs to tuck in the rear side panels for assembly to provide a finished look. You saw before How the rear platform was mocked up for fit. Finally I made a mock-up out of 1/4" pressboard and took that to a local fabrication house to have a platform stamped out of 14 ga steel. The resulting Item looked like this:
Next was the luggage rack to hold the soft bags. The bags I chose were available from Aerostitch and have attachments on the backside for hooking them easily to a rail sustem no larger than .75" diameter. Using 5/8" tubing we (Jesse Jiminez, my neighbor who has great mechanical skills, and I who can hold the metal for him while he cuts) bent hoops that would accomodate the luggage and then made structural pieces to cross over the top of the Vstrom rear tail cone (between the cone and the platform) which would be held in place by the bolts that hold the tailcone and the forward attachment points for the standard OEM rack. You can see in these pictures how it all worked:
Of course the platform attached to the bike by using the holes in the rear tail cone to bolt through to the subframe (with the luggage crossmember underneath it) and the forward end used the pillon seat attachment with the key release. The resulting Item held the luggage much closer to the bike, was light and while it looks prety wimpy I have dropped the bike (several times) on either side without bending these hoops and once I had to pick up the bike by grabbing the aux fuel tank that is attached to the platform and had no problem there either (I'm simply not easy on my rally equipment).
posted by Brian R at 3:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home