DR800: It Begins.
27 05 09 - 11:40 I've had a busy weekend. An outing to Mosh in Derby on Saturday night, Sunday afternoon and all of Monday watching the British Superbike round at Donington. And every other waking moment from 3pm Friday to 8pm Monday spent in the garage working on the DR800. It's going to take me a few posts to cover the weekend's work, so this one is just setting the scene...The roots of this work go right back to the day I picked the DR800 from its former home just outside King's Lynn. I'd travelled down on the train, and the seller came to pick me up on the DR. In the handful of miles sat on the back of it between the railway station and his house I managed to melt a hole in my textile trousers on the high mounted Laser can.
Since the ZXR400 is soon to lose its pillion seat, the DR needs to be a bike capable of carrying two people without setting fire to them. It also needs to be able to carry a reasonable amount of luggage without setting fire to that - especially since it needs to get me and assorted crap to the South of France in July.
I settled on the idea of metal panniers, being a) pretty heatproof, and b) in keeping with a dualsport/adventure type bike. Finding some for a price I was prepared to pay was another question, but a certain well known internet auction site threw up a guy in Germany making 'Alukoffer' for considerably less than Touratech money. Even so, it took me a while to get round to ordering them, but I eventually got round to it and they turned up in the middle of last week.
While the DR is equipped with a frame plenty strong enough to carry the weight of full luggage, I was still going to have to fabricate a rack to join the two together, and this was, inevitably, going to mean cutting bits of the rear plastics away. So given the bike was going to look a bit different anyway, it may as well look completely different. Fortunately, I already had some ideas along these lines.
I've mentioned this bike before. It belongs to a chap called Stephan Hessler, who specialises in all manner of nice things for Suzuki DR's. The bike itself is one of the Suzuki works 'DR Zeta' race bikes, ridden by Gaston Rahier in the Dakar Rally in the early 90's. And, in my opinion, it looks really rather tasty.
Having taken a look at various bikes and how they deal with bolting on hard luggage I also have to confess a liking for the back end of BMW's R1200GS - there's a seat, a subframe, and some lights back there, but that's it. Pure function. Shame it's attached to about half a ton of bike.
So I've got a plan...and not very long to get it done. Best get on with it then.
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