Pictures of the Rig

Charlie6 and SonjaM mentioned in a comment on my last post to maybe post some additional shots of the rig taken at other angles. I must admit that most of my photos have been showing details like the lights or the sidecar mounts. On Sunday afternoon, I headed up to the West Ridge parking lot at the university as I figured that it should be pretty empty and there would be plenty of daylight. I have all of the cases mounted on the bike but they are mostly empty.

I was pleased that the right case lid still opened enough for it to be useful and, in fact, opens almost all the way before hitting the sidecar frame. I just mounted the top box on Friday on the Reynolds rack that I had picked up on Ebay almost five years ago. I haven't been able to use the rack since it required different side case mounts. The rack has two positions forward and back. The back position allows the seat to be opened and when it's forward, the case is positioned over the rear cowling even more forward than last summer when I had the box mounted to the seat pan. I found a parts place online that had a used set of the proper case mounts and installed the rack on at the end of last Summer. Maybe I should look at installing the top box on the sidecar rack. After all, more weight there would be fine, I think.

After seeing this shot, I noticed that the nose of the sidecar is down. Since I didn't check the alignment after removing and re-installing the sidecar, I didn't catch this earlier. I raised up the front and rechecked the toe-in and lean. The toe-in is 5/8" and the lean out is still 1°. But of course this now requires additional "test" rides.

The two small holes below the front sidecar turn signal and on the rear are mounting holes for the Cozy nameplates. The plates were in a plastic bag in the trunk and the holes had rivets filling them. I drilled out the rivets to put the plates in place. The one on the rear has the street address of Cozy in India as "Just past the Police Station".

This iPhone picture was taken at the same time as the others but it came out underexposed. Not sure why. Maybe I switched to a different camera app.
I did notice some low speed wobble that I may have originally thought was simply the icy, bumpy road. It occurs at around 10mph and isn't an issue at this time especially with the slippery roads.

These last two pictures were taken on another test ride around 5pm after adjusting the height if the sidecar. It is now pretty close to sunset at this time of year. The bike is at the same location as the previous photos but there isn't much daylight left. You can see the small white LED marker lights I added to the sidecar as well as the parking light on the motorcycle. The bike is old enough to still have a separate headlight switch which I like. It's nice to be able to turn off the headlight when cranking the engine especially with our colder temperatures or when the bike is just idling.

I'm not very satisfied with the behavior of the new tail/brake/right turn light. The trailer light converter dropped the voltage too much so the turn signal and the brake light were pretty anemic. I removed the converter and turned the new red light into simply a tail/brake light and for now, put the bulb back into the right turn signal on the bike until I can find a nice, bright amber turn signal for the sidecar.

Sunday was really warm with temperatures venturing into the 20s (°F). This really made for slick roads so the studded tires got a good workout. It'll be interesting to see how many of the studs are still there.

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