Bagman Soft Saddlebags
BagMan Soft Saddlebags
EVALUATION
Mush Emmons
Exactly how much stuff will fit into the BagMan saddlebags I don't know, not in a scientific way, even though there must be some cubic dimension filed away somewhere. Instead, I know I could cram one week’s worth of clothes for street and all-weather riding, plus a module of cameras and lenses, a soft portfolio case, a nylon stuff bag with basic spare parts, a clutch cable and a clutch tool-—I’ll explain about those two in a minute—into both bags. Combined weight was about 35 lb. and when full the bags didn’t look like they do in the store, but they didn’t pop open either.
This wasn’t the usual test, I guess. When I decided to ride my Norton 850 Commando from my studio in San Francisco to New York City and back, with scenic touring along the way, I didn’t have luggage or a way to carry it on the bike. The Cycle World guys offered to let me use the saddlebags they’d just gotten from Bruce Vetter, better known as The BagMan,if I’d report on how they worked.
The bags are made of Cordura and come with a mounting system of loops and snaps that fasten to the rear frame tubes and stabilizer straps from bag to bag, across the rear of the seat. With no practice I attached the fittings in half an hour. The cross-over straps were cinchdd as
tight as possible, so when I was on the seat and the bags were full, they rode as high as I could get them; the bottoms of the bags were maybe half an inch above the upswept mufflers.
The bags have zippers running threequarters of the way around. They are strong and held up well. The zipper pulls have leather thongs, which you’ll quickly lose unless you knot them. And if you snag a plastic bag with the zipper, it will stop dead in its tracks. Avoid at all costs. There are wide carrying handles with leather reinforced mounting points and they, too, held up well. The handles even stretch enough to let you carry both bags together.
During the 10-week trip the bags were exposed to the elements for a total of 722 hours. Fortunately for me but unfortunately for this story, only 20 hours of that was spent in the rain, and only three hours of that was downpour.
That was enough time to point out a problem. Cordura is not quite waterproof. The bags come with really waterproof slipon covers. They keep out the rain but they pull over the tops and don’t quite cover the bottoms, which get good and wet—and soaked through—from road spray. This allows dampness at the lower levels and high humidity elsewhere. One on-the-road solution is supplied by the built-in inner laun-
dry sack, of waterproof nylon. Stuff the bag’s contents into the sack. There isn’t time to do this before you ride into a thunderstorm, though, and mixing clean clothes, dirty laundry and cameras is not a lot of fun. It would be better if the covers completely sealed off the bags from the wet.
On my Norton the soft bags tended to rest against the shocks and they rubbed the paint off the springs. At the same time their flexibility let them mold themselves inward and that, plus the sag downward, at least put their weight as low and centered as it could be. Didn’t hurt the handling at all and handling is why I have the Norton in the first place. Oh, just because there are all these stories; I didn’t need the spare clutch and the bike made it twice across the continent with none of the horrors you hear about.
Soft luggage is, for me, a romantic approach to touring. It lacks the hard edged restriction of known cubic capacity. With the saddlebags and maybe the Bagman tank bag, formerly sold by Vetter Corp. but now available only from BagMan,you always can find room for anything you discover you can’t leave behind. The bags are offered in brown, black or tan, $125, from The BagMan, P.O. Box 2111, Station A, Champaign, 111. 61820.
