PANNIERS/LUGGAGE/RACKS

Any trip longer than a day or two will require some luggage to carry your belongings, spare parts, etc. For carrying lots of things with you, you'll need a good rack for the bike first off. The Adventure Motorcycling Handbook will tell you most of what you need to know about racks. Unfortunately, the XR650L isn't a popular bike for mounting panniers and hence you won't find many people who have done it.

Happy-Trail makes an excellent rack for the XR650L, and in fact I belive they're the only company making a rack for the XR650L. They have a very good reputation for quality, so I bought their SU rack, tail rack and some 35 Liter aluminum panniers. Here's a picture of just the rear rack on my bike. The rear turn signals must be removed from their mounts and bolted to the top rack - nice, since you end up removing some unnecessary pieces:

Pannier Racks

The complete set of Something Unique racks can be used to mount Aluminum panniers on the bike, and I believe you can also mount Givi luggage using them as well. Here are a couple picutres I snapped right after getting it all mounted (clicking gets a higher resolution picture):

Mounting the Pannier Racks

Mounting the racks and boxes was a task that took an entire afternoon for me. For what it's worth, here's what I experienced:

There's not a lot of demand for these racks, so each one is hand made. The quality is excellent - very nice welding and the rack was powder coated. But the first thing I ran into was I discovered that the holes didn't line up very well with the existing bolt holes. This could be due to the fact that I've had a couple crashes on the bike that sent it tumbling, so it's possible that the subframe was bent slightly. So after getting everything all apart, it took two people about half hour to figure out how to push and pull on the bike and the rack to get the bolts to line up. So much for having a rack that's easy to take off when you want to run a hare scramble...

Be sure to trim back the bolts at the back of the subframe - when you bottom in the rear, they'll rub your outside knobbies and tear them apart.

Of Course, there's the option of using soft bags rather than large aluminum boxes. Which is the right one for the job depends on your application. If you need to keep the bike light and aren't worried about anyone snooping through your belongings, soft panniers are your best choice. They're light, cheap and dont hurt as bad when the bike falls on you. If you're going to be in places where someone could easily steal your bags or their contents, you're best off using hard panniers that lock.

Cracking Subframe Problems

Loading up the bike with lots of weight on the subframe WILL sooner or later break the subframe if you take the bike onto rough terrain - yes, even just dirt roads. Anything that will shake the bike or occasionally bottom out the suspension will cause lots of stress on the subframe. Consider the fact that Honda engineers did not design this bike with mounting luggage in mind - and if you have two full panniers and a top rack loaded down, you're probably exceeding the capacity Honda had in mind by an order of magnitude at least. Go to a local welder or fabricator and add reinforcements where the subframe meets the main frame at the footpegsReinforce the subframe, and most people seem to prefer to add reinforcements that go from the footpegs to the luggage rack - just another way to add strength to the system. It's probably not likely that you could reinforce the subframe too much - a quick search at the Horizons Unlimited Bulletin Board will reveal that broken subframes happen VERY frequently, even on bikes like the BMW GSes which are deisgned to carry panniers, but again, very light loads in the panniers.

Here's an example of where mine cracked, even without carrying heavy loads, but from a bad crash on some rocks: