Finishing February

What a month... work consumed a jillion hours of lat night/early morning 70 hour weeks and we finally launched a new service so this weekend is the "eye of the hurricane" before support picks back up next week on the alignment of 1000+ accounts to the new system.

With Mystique gone, Mistress get the focus of maintenance attention and I wasn't getting power to the trunk light and the fuse was good. Fearing a short that would start popping fuses like popcorn, I removed the rear seat and disconnected the wiring while I checked power to the cannon plug connectors (love BMW, everything is through a central harness) to the rear trunk, heated seat, and power port). Everything looked good and found that the light unit itself has a switch that is not making contact well enough, so I removed the trunk to get a better angle of access and replace it with an LED lighted dome.

I had always read on the forums that losing the trunk changed the handling on the bike something wildly great, and lifting the trunk off convinced me that the 40+ pounds parked that high had to have some impact, but when riding 2-up you aren't into the corners like a curve cowboy anyways, so the extra weight of pillion and trunk wouldn't make that much of a difference. But Mrs. Redtigre isn't riding with the temps under 65°f for a couple of months anyways so a quick ride was in order to experience the dropped weight.

Well, a quick ride turned into 120 miles.

The weight reduction did wonders for the handling, especially with the cross-winds I encountered in the Basin between Moses Lake and Ephrata, but I needed an area I could test it better so I shot over West to Martin Road between Ephrata and Quincy to throw it through some farm access roads that are 8 miles of curves that have more twists than the  rest of Grant County combined.








The weight difference was what they say... wow.


Going into the corners took away the feeling of being pushed more into them from the rear and put the weight over the handling area of the front half of the motorcycle and made it about as flickable as an LT can be... which is pretty flickable for a 1/2 ton motorcycle






But it looked... weird.

Too weird.

Maybe a small custom rack to take up the space but I'm just not used to seeing the big girl like this, but it'll be fun for awhile until the weather warms up.

Besides, where would I carry the kitchen sink?