I like going camping with a truck. You’ve got plenty of space to load your gear and when you get there you can set up a nice little spot. I guess I’ve already told you how much I hate carrying camping gear on a motorcycle and that motels near Bonneville, Utah are expensive. But it seems I can’t stop myself, I just keep complaining. I see those BMW earth-roamer types with all the gear piled up over their heads and I think, “Oh, Hell no! I’m cool as an ice cube, that’s not me.”
Yet here I am. Here I am piling camping junk over my head like a Starbucks-sipping, Hi-Vis wearing, midlevel manager-who-mistakenly-thinks-corporate-values-his-efforts, Beemer rider. The shame, it burns hot.
That’s not the worst of it. I just know the flimsy aluminum sub-frame on the Husqvarna is going to break. It has to. This bike was designed with two things in mind: to pop wheelies and flee from the Po-Po. Because I don’t have a running street bike I’ve turned the Husky into a single cylinder Gold Wing. It burns, man.
No way was I going to get all the camping stuff onto the Trophy Rack that the Husky was wearing. I had to dramatically expand capacity and the only way to do that was with saddlebags. To do bags I needed some infrastructure in place that would prevent the bags from tangling in the rear wheel and melting to the high mount, noisy, life saving, public opinion destroying, Arrow exhaust can.
I have no way to weld stainless steel but I have a lot of stainless tubing so I chopped it up and took the sticks to Roy’s welding (out by the mini goat farm) and the fine crew at Roy’s stuck it all together.
Next I needed a few plastic bits to fit the existing rack and give my U-bolts something to tighten against without bending the metal straps. I knocked these out of some thick plastic I had left over from a boat job 35 years ago.
My Safety Exhaust on the Husqvarna is high and tight so I riveted a metal heat shield on the left side of the Super MoTour bike. My buddy Mike loaned me the saddlebags, I don’t want them to catch fire in front of him. You’ll be hearing more about Mike, as this Bonneville ride is his idea. All told, I’ve probably doubled the poundage of the featherweight Husky with this jungle gym hanging off the back.
Unrelated to the luggage situation but still needing sorting was the Husky’s headlight. The normal bulb is an incandescent 35-watt, both high and low beam. The bulb works ok in the daytime but it casts a feeble light for night use. It’s like having a Black Hole on the front of your motorcycle. The pattern reaches only a few feet into the gloom. On moonless nights it struggles to illuminate the front fender. It’s so dim bugs fly away from it. Hey, I’m here all week, invite your friends.
The other problem with the stock bulb is that it constantly blows out. The tiny filament shatters and when that happens you get an intermittent headlight that turns on and off as the filament shakes around making contact now and then. Sometimes the bulb will self-heal, the wire re-welds itself and the light may stay on a few hundred miles. Despite all this, the inside of the bulb is usually broken into a million pieces by the time 1000 miles rolls past.
I tried a bunch of different bulbs. LED, Halogen, HID, and incandescent; most of them ran too hot for the Husqvarna’s plastic reflector. For this trip I’ve settled on a cheap LED bulb with no watt rating or any information stamped into the metal housing. It is a very crummy bulb, perhaps even weaker than the incandescent bulb but I’m hoping it stands up to vibration better. A strange side effect of the LED electronics is that the high beam indicator light stays on all the time. I’m sure the bulb won’t short out and fry my electrical system. What could go wrong?
That’s it. I’m leaving in a few days so I’ll be blogging from the road like Berk taught me to do. See you in Bonneville.
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