New farkles - Rally Raid products soft luggage racks

Not my bike or my picture

Last summer I came to the conclusion that in order to travel comfortably (not constantly fiddling with luggage during fill ups etc.) I need luggage racks. My preferred option were the so called Wolfman racks, but apparently they are no longer available. I looked through offerings from KTM, Touratech and the like, but found them to be both ugly and of wrongly shaped for my plans.

The Rally Raid soft luggage racks seemed to be the best available alternative and I made the order a while ago. It was also important that the RR racks and my Nomadic rear rack would fir together which they do judging from the pictures found at ADVrider.com. I haven't actually received the goods or installed them yet, but both of those things should happen at the end of the month.

In the meanwhile I got a heads up from The Rolling Hobo that the RR racks have a weak spot at the lowest mounting bolt. His rack fractured from both sides during the Eastern Dirt ride. You can see pics from the failure at the week 3 entry of his blog. The plan is to tackle the issue with large spacers and see if that is enough to prevent them from breaking. I'll post more once I get the racks mounted.