So a couple of months back I sorted out getting the Givi E52 from the Concours working with the rear seat basepan for the Ninjette. Recall the photos from when I was trying to see how the case would look:
Since I needed a monokey rack in order to attach and detach the case quickly, I bought one on eBay. It came with the Givi rack hardware from the BMW the seller had it on, which presented me with the option to hack up the mount and bolt that to the seat pan. I worked that out while we were still in Arizona, and rode to work a couple of times with it bolted in place:
I wanted to work out some sort of color-matched cover for the seatpan, which being white stuck out like a sore thumb on the black bike. Additionally, the rack was bolted to the seatpan at 3 points, and zip-tied at the back of the pan because it was very secure laterally, but tended to buck up and down over bumps. Not enough so that I was worried about it coming off, but enough to bug me while riding. So… since I’m riding the little bike as much as possible out here to try and save $$$ on fuel here, I figured it was time to get this cleaned up. Since I still had the seat padding and cover, I decided to do a little art project and utilize some stock parts to help me out. Here’s where I ended up:
I cut the front part of the seat padding off and put it back on the seatpan in front of the bolted-down rack. I then re-stretched the cover over the pan, padding, and rack combined, and then bolted the mount plate on top of everything. In order to further strengthen the connection at the back of the rack (which had previously been zip-tied), I cut slots on both sides of the rear rack bar and threaded a hose clamp through the slots and around the bar. You can see the portion of the clamp that was outside the seatpan with the seat removed and flipped over (lower left of the seat):
The seat fits perfectly, and with the padding in front of the rack, everything actually lines up really nicely when it’s all buttoned up:
The case sits a bit higher than the initial test-fit photos, but since it’s the same width as I am, it doesn’t hang out in the wind very much:
While I was typing this, Kelly noted that I sounded pretty busy here in the office, so I tried explaining it. After multiple attempts, she said I sounded like “Blah, blah, blah, uninteresting stuff, blah blah…” since I was somewhat geeking out over the whole thing, and she didn’t understand what all the parts were. So, in an effort to paint a better picture, I walked out into the garage, took the seat back off the bike, brought it in and summed up with “I made this.”. I think the visual explanation without bike-geek-speak might work better in the future… 😛
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