Farkle Season Part 4

Yeah, I decided to spin this one out a little ;)

Now for that smaller box...

Well, now that I had another endurance ride capable, long distance touring weapon, I needed someway to cart some gear.  I while ago I bought some cheap throw-over bags (more on them later) but to fit them to the bike and keep them off the exhaust/out of the rear wheel, I needed some sort of racks.

Enter the cheapest ones I could find on E-bay - some Tusk pannier racks.  Cheap (relatively), they may have been, but these things are really good quality and look strong as.

In the picture above you can see an inner frame sitting inside the pannier frame.  These are actually fittings to attach to panniers (Tusk or other) and allow easy on and off fitting of the panniers.  These have been removed and live back in the box with some other unneeded WR bits.

One of the first jobs was to fit a small mount (visible in the plastic bag above) underneath the sub-frame of the bike.  I guess over the years Yamaha may have changed a few things on the WR.  This did not fit up nicely with the plastic rear light carrier - the clean thing in the picture below...

The mount actually sits on top of this with the bolt holes for the pannier frames hanging down below it but the plastic is too wide.  Enter a sharp blade...

I actually had to take out even more...

We'll find out if I've taken out too much strength or not one day...

And that was just about the hardest part of the install.  The instructions were excellent (better than the Safari tank ones).  I only grabbed the wrong bolt twice and the instructions even had a suggested bolt-tightening process.  Piece of cake!

Rear brace is a good idea and even holds the relocated helmet lock now (not pictured)

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I did need to re-run the wire to the rego-plate light.  That's it before I moved it.

The it was time to button everything up and take the after pics.

Gotta show off that tank!

And as for those $99 throw-over bags?  Well, here they are in non-expanded mode, empty on the bike.

They are still pretty big not expanded and will take some tying down to hold them in place.  May not quite be the ideal solution, we'll see...