After my recent Queensland trip where, for the seventeen millionth time I took way too much luggage, I decided that I’d just take the top box for last weekend’s trip up the north coast. The trouble started when I went to fit it to the bike only to find out that it didn’t fit. At first I couldn’t figure it out because the rack had always fitted on the 750. But the “legs” of the rack wouldn’t fit all the way into the sockets on the rails. I then noticed that the reason was because the horizontal bars of the rack were hitting the rear bodywork. Eh?
Stand back and have a look and the reason suddenly became clear. The Ventura rails on the 800 are located at the bottom of the rear bodywork whereas, on the 750, they were located above the rear tailpiece, as per the photos below.
That difference of approximately 50 mm was the critical factor. So I started pondering how I could solve the problem. My metal-working skills are very limited as I noted in my article the other day so I took the problem to a couple of mechanics in town. Both of them understood the problem but had neither the resources nor the expertise to solve my problem. No criticism of them, it was just outside of their field of work.
So I took my problem to my good friends at MLR Engineering in town. They have done some excellent work for me in the past and a quick look at the rack and a solution was suggested that was so simple that I should have thought of it myself (though I wouldn’t have been able to fix it anyway). Instead of looking at ways of extending the “legs” and making the rack fit that way, my tame guru said, “That’s easy, we’ll just take the rack off the hoop and weld it back on 50 mm higher than it is now, we’ll even put a couple of gussets on it just to strengthen it a bit more.” You see, that’s why I love professionals.
Not only would they do the job for me but they would only charge me $50 for the privilege. AND, when they found out that I was planning on leaving for my trip the next day, the foreman said, “Tell you what, we can do it this arvo, come around at about 4 and it should be done for you.” Here I must say that, at no point was I trying to hustle them to do the job straight away, I was happy to go without and pick it up on the Monday as originally suggested.
So, I returned at 4 as requested to find the job done, gussets in place, a fresh coat of matt black paint and good to go. As seen in the pic above, the bars now clear the rear bodywork by a comfortable margin and my road test over the last few days indicate that the surgery has been successful and the patient will live.
Happy days.