Thursday, January 08, 2009

Tailbag Gone, Trying a Tankbag on the R80

I had recently removed the tailbag which I'd installed earlier on Brigitta, my 1987 R80 Beemer. Part of its fastenings had torn loose when I was struggling with the motorcycle when I got stuck in mud during my last ride of 2008.

As I looked under it to see about re-securing it, I noted that the bottom of the tailbag had rubbed against the paint on the motorcycle's body. Not good. Some hand polishing got rid of most of the damage but I did not elect to put the tailbag back on on Brigitta.

I carried on without it, using my system cases to carry my camera but it was getting banged around a bit; not to mention it being a pain to open/shut the system case each time I stopped to take pictures.

I saw that newenough.com was having a closeout sale on tankbags, amongst other things and got the Rapid Transit Bradley tank bag for a mere $15, total came to less than $22 with shipping. Such a deal.

The bag arrived today and here's some photos of it installed on Brigitta. I had to cobble an anchor point for the rear strap for now. In the process of doing this, discovered one of the two rubber straps holding down my battery had broken! Damn.


The weird looking striping on the sides of the bag are a function of my camera, the bag is plain black nylon material.



Not too bad looking and doesn't seem to spoil her lines as much as the tailbag seemed to do. I'll see how it works out, I just have to detach the rear fastener to access the gas tank cap so that shouldn't be a problem either.

The light blue thing underneath the tank bag is a microfiber cloth, even though the tank bag came with "protective" material underneath it, not taking any chances.

1 comment:

RichardM said...

Looks good. I use a mag-mount Rapid Transit bag that I really like a lot. It came with straps for using it like a backpack as well as a hydration bag. And it fits my R100RT well.