Suzuki DR650 - Racks for soft bags

Planning on doing the Western portion of the Trans America Trail with my best friend at the end of August. We will be riding from Trinidad, CO to Port Orford, OR which is approx 2800 miles, most of it (80-90%) off-road! In order to carry camping gear, tools, food, water and personal necessities for the journey, you need to have some king of luggage for the bike. I bought some water proof expedition bags, but needed some racks to hold them. The commercially available options were not up to my standards as far as how I wanted them to mount and where the weight would be carried. Some of them, are pretty expensive too! (To be clear, I am not criticizing other rack makers products, there are some very nice ones out there, they just differ in design and construction from how I think they should be made and what I wanted.)

Naturally, my best option was to build my own!

The criteria;

1. Must have 3 mounting points. Many commercially available options only mount in 2 spots which allows the racks to twist/bend. The available ones with 3 Mounting points, sit too far back in my humble opinion.
2. Must carry most of the load forward of the rear axle. This is for better weight distribution which greatly affects handling on a motorcycle.
3. Retain passenger footrests. Never know, we may need to use them if a bike breaks down!
4. Had to be compatible with the existing Suzuki tail rack.

I already have a pretty well equipped fabrication shop in my garage. TIG welder, Bandsaw, drill press, grinders, etc. However, I was lacking a key piece of equipment, a tubing bender! There are not alot of options for tubing benders out there. Most are pretty expensive and geared for production type of work. I just needed something that would work for my project. I found one sold by Woodward Fab. It's just a cheap, Chinese import, however, I was confident it would work well enough for my needs. Once I received it, it appeared to be made fairly well, but the dies were pretty rough. I spent a little time with a die grinder and sanding roll to smooth them out. 

Other than that, all I needed to buy was 12ft, ($7.25 worth!) of 3/4 inch .065 wall steel tubing.

The 1st step was I needed to fabricate a mount for my new tubing bender. They are designed to mount to a work bench, but my work bench is not mounted to the floor or house so trying to bend tubing on that would have resulted in chasing it around the garage.I happened to have about 5ft of square tubing large enough to fit in the receiver hitch of my truck. That certainly would make a solid bender platform! So, I quickly put together a mount. Now I could begin bending tubing!

Note; If you click on a picture, it will open them up in a gallery view where you can see the larger versions.

Now that the tubing was shaped, I was able to tack weld everything together to get mounting locations set. I bent up several extra 90 degree bends to cut up and use for the tubes between the main loop and mounting points.

Once everything was tacked into place, I mounted up my bags to make sure everything fit the way I wanted it to. LOOKS GOOD!

The last step was to weld everything together permanently, I also added some strap loops, then prime and paint with several coats of Rustoleum paint.

The finished product, mounted with stainless steel fasteners. I am very happy with they way they turned out! One more thing I can check off of my long list of preparations for the trip!