Trunk or Trailer

Chapter 3.
         Well, It's January 9th. Still snow on the ground, and still not able to take the bike out of the shed due to all the snow and ice in the back yard, I continue to dream and make plans for the upcoming riding season. As you can see at the top of my blog, I have added a new picture. Thanks to my son Geoff and his many talents with Photoshop. It is a picture of Zoey. Oh yea, we decided to name her. Anyhow, you see two bikes up there. They are indeed the same bike. Yamaha calls our bike a Touring/Cruiser. When you go for the long rides you have the windscreen and backrest for comfort ability and in just a few seconds, the windscreen and backrest can come off making it a cool cruiser for around town. We keep the backrest on but the windscreen comes off on the warm evenings. In the last episode, I mentioned that our Tour Deluxe had a sister bike.

             The Venture, with all the bells and whistles one needs for total comfort on long trips. Well not necessarily. Other than the fairing and trunk it is the same bike. And again, I don't like the fairing in front. I mean, it comes with a cassette deck. I would have to transfer all my mp3's to cassette. LOL. But herein lies the small problem. Our RSTD is very comfortable to ride even though we haven't had the long trip yet. The issue is storage. As you can see above, the saddlebags on the side are the same on both bikes, but there is a rather large trunk on the back that we don't have. On a 1 or 2 day trip, the 3 bags are a decent enough size to pretty much put everything you need in it. I thought about looking on ebay for a used trunk and bracket from someone who was parting out a bike. There were a few out there for WAY more than I wanted to pay. So I began reading the motorcycle forums for other ideas.
        I have seen numerous bikes on the road pulling trailers and thought a little about it. But with the Suzuki being only an 800cc there was no way I was pulling anything. But now I have the luxury of driving a 1300cc V4 with power to spare and an overdrive. I began to search the motorcycle trailer websites. There are a ton of cool bike trailers out there if you have the money.
       Motorcycle trailers come in 2 forms, a 2 wheel traditional style trailer and a single wheel style.

          I did some research on both styles. I really liked the single wheel style. Very cool looking and a few companies made a very retro style to match the retro of our bike. One brand even boasted removing the trailer from the bike and pushing it right into the hotel room. No need to unpack in the parking lot. But after talking to many riders who have towed pretty much everything, I found that the single wheel had issues. 

          You see, there is this thing called tongue weight. the heavier the weight, the lighter the front end of the bike, hence bad steering. And that's bad. With the wheel in the back like in the photo, all the weight in the trailer will add to the tongue weight. But with the traditional 2 wheel trailer, you can balance the load across the axle to make for a much lighter tongue. Hence, better control of the bike. So reluctantly, I decided to go with the 2 wheel version. 

            I began to narrow my search a bit, kind off like the cars.com commercial, picking the different things I liked abut this trailer and that trailer. Until I came to the conclusion that no matter which one I picked, 1500 dollars was just a bit too much to spend on a storage device that was to replace the trunk that I could get for 800 dollars. 

            So, what did I decide to do? Tune in next time to read the exciting conclusion of to trailer or not to trailer....... or something like that.

Namaste

Dave