triangletom
Active member
My BMW CE-04 came from the dealer with the white BMW side bag, which I rather like. It has just enough room to carry a J1772 cable, a laptop, a hoodie, and a handful of adapters: everything I need unless I'm carrying a passenger. I had originally planned to buy the BMW top-case to match until I learned that it blocks the passenger seat. I now see that Wunderlich has found a solution for that, but I'm not sure if it was around when I bought the bike.
I looked around for better luggage solutions so that I could carry around a jacket, pants, and helmet for passengers, and found Shad. They've got a great mount, but I was disappointed to hear that the Shad top-case rack interfered with the BMW side-bag rack. For reasons of range and aesthetics, I generally prefer not to have a top-case mounted unless necessary, but it is time-consuming to swap between the two racks.
So, I got to work on a solution:
Here are the modifications that were required:
* Cutting the inner ~2mm from the screw holes where the BMW side-rack mounts to the back of the seat
* Adding new screw holes to the Shad top-case rack, about ~25mm under where it mounts to the back of the seat
* Enlarging the holes where the BMW side rack attaches underneath the seat so that it can deal with the new (~15mm) offset
* Adding ~25mm of spacers between the two racks underneath the seat.
* Longer screws all around
Due to the interference between the two racks, the side bag now sits about 25mm lower and 15mm further back than it did originally but it appears to function perfectly.
The bag kinda looks like it's at an angle, but the problem is that I didn't close the bag as tightly on the left side as the right side.
Some close-up photos of the redneck engineering involved:
I looked around for better luggage solutions so that I could carry around a jacket, pants, and helmet for passengers, and found Shad. They've got a great mount, but I was disappointed to hear that the Shad top-case rack interfered with the BMW side-bag rack. For reasons of range and aesthetics, I generally prefer not to have a top-case mounted unless necessary, but it is time-consuming to swap between the two racks.
So, I got to work on a solution:
Here are the modifications that were required:
* Cutting the inner ~2mm from the screw holes where the BMW side-rack mounts to the back of the seat
* Adding new screw holes to the Shad top-case rack, about ~25mm under where it mounts to the back of the seat
* Enlarging the holes where the BMW side rack attaches underneath the seat so that it can deal with the new (~15mm) offset
* Adding ~25mm of spacers between the two racks underneath the seat.
* Longer screws all around
Due to the interference between the two racks, the side bag now sits about 25mm lower and 15mm further back than it did originally but it appears to function perfectly.
The bag kinda looks like it's at an angle, but the problem is that I didn't close the bag as tightly on the left side as the right side.
Some close-up photos of the redneck engineering involved: