“Best Value?” – Dowco Rally Pack Value Series luggage

hey everyone... this is my first post (I think), but I thought it might be nice to share my impressions and frustrations with you all concerning a recent purchase of mine. originally, this write-up included descriptive pictures, but I don't think I can include those on the message board.


When your sportbike is your only means of getting from point A to Point B, finding a way to haul your absolutely necessary worldly possessions is important, and in the current market, you really haven’t a plethora of luggage choices that won’t empty your wallet. When you’re in college, have a loan on said bike, and only work full time 3 months out of each year, spending $300-plus on a set of soft luggage is a fiscal absurdity. How is it possible to rationalize a contraption with a price tag higher than that found on your jacket, your helmet, and your girlfriend’s Christmas gift? All it’s required to do is carry your $10 Wal-mart jeans, a few T-shirts, a toothbrush, underwear, and a few choice periodicals for a weekend in the canyons without causing backpack-induced scoliosis. In all honesty, I don’t sew, but while shopping for a soft tailbag/saddlebag set, I was tempted to learn. Luckily, I discovered that Dowco, a company known as well for its watercraft accessories as for bike gear, offers a tailbag/saddlebag combo, the RallyPack Value Series, for a reasonable $130 mrsp. Shopping around with a call to Chaparral Motorsports netted the entire kit for around $80. I thought, “Perfect: a company that makes a simplistic, bare-bones luggage set at a reasonable price… these are people who think like I do.” Well, while the conceptualization of the product certainly is in line with my idealization of the perfect saddlebags, the execution, sadly, is not. “You get what you pay for” may have killed the “victorious value” mantra in my morning situp/pushup/meditative reflection routine, and I may be in need of seamstress school after all.

Out of the box, the bags aren’t terribly hard to set up. A plastic support gives permanent shape to each of the squashed, nebulous nylon saddlebags after wrestling it into pockets in the bow and stern of the main (only) compartment. The tailbag requires no assembly. The saddlebags attach to each other with two beefy hook-and-loop straps, which drape rather hideously over the passenger seat of my 2006 SV650S. They will not fit underneath the seat, and this conspires with the bags’ necessitated use of a veritable tension wire to the passenger pegs for proper attachment to make for a severe inconvenience to prospective pillion passengers. Never mind that the bags are hardly large enough to stow a 12-pack of diet coke per side. Aside from the usual Guzzi-like biased turn-in tendencies common to a “His side, her side” packing approach, you’ll run into comfort and fitment trouble even when chauffeuring the smallest-framed, best-packing companion. She should be riding her own bike anyway, so give her the boot if you want these saddlebags to be part of your routine touring kit. Who knows, maybe if she dumped you, you could afford to buy a nicer set of bags.

With nobody on the back, it’s imperative to keep the tailbag attached.  Without it, the saddlebags’ oversized, lamo-afterthought excuses for exhaust heat shields and those big goofy drape straps will make your bike look like Quasimoto. With the tailbag on, you step up a level to a tired, forced, expired beauty. Paris Hilton comes to mind, but unlike an heiress to a hotel empire, the tailbag’s got some real-world skills. It’s almost big enough to fit my widescreen laptop inside, and attaches easily to the saddlebags with four buckle straps, even when jacked up by the tent and sleeping bag you may feel inclined to sandwich between it and the passenger seat. That really is the easy part. Getting the bags attached to the bike so that they don’t shift at high speeds is a different story.

I always like to give credit where credit’s due, but keep those credit cards in your pockets for Dowco’s embarrassing failure to provide a workable universal mounting system for their bags. All four of the straps that dangle from the ends of the saddlebags are meagerly adjustable in length, and have male buckle ends sewn to their web straps. They expect you to be able to strap these things to your bike with the four loops of strap they provide you with, each of which has only one female buckle side and is not adjustable. The only suitable place to mount the fore straps on an SV is to the passenger footpegs, and there is nowhere especially convenient to buckle the rearward straps either. The answer? Tighten the saddlebags down with the footpeg straps until you think you’re bending your bike’s subframe, then find a clever way to tie two of the auxiliary straps together and loop this knotted mess under the tail of your bike. Snap it into the straps at the back end of the bags. Cinch those down, and you’re ready to go. You’re ready to go, that is, unless it’s supposed to rain.

Initially, I thought the system’s rain protection was great. There are very waterproof rain hoods sewn into compartments on all three bags, and with adjustable elastic waistbands on each, they snap right over the luggage with little complaint. The first problem, though, is that since the drape and tailbag straps come right off the top end of the saddlebags near the zipper, the rain hood can’t snap all the way over the top of the saddlebags to provide the zipper adequate protection from driving rain. The second, infinitely more serious problem is that the hoods are frighteningly oversized and somewhat flimsy. On my wet, 250-mile highway trek from Cleveland OH to State College PA, this translated into two gaping, matching holes in the rain covers where they’d flapped themselves into oblivion. They’re not very waterproof that way. Neither was the tailbag zipper at that point. I didn’t overload the bags or do anything funky to them at all, and after that trip the seams adjacent to the zippers on the bag’s compartment had come apart.

After a call to Dowco customer service, I shipped the first set of bags back at my own expense--$17—and they sent me a new set “free of charge,” claiming that “these bags are usually very good” and that they haven’t had many warranty claims. Well, I believed them, but not 5 minutes down the road to the grocery store with almost nothing loading my replacement set, I noticed the seams near the zippers on the saddlebags separating. I’ve since called Dowco and they’ve happily sent me a third set (and let me keep the second), but I fear that my nightmare of the single-use saddlebags will continue. Maybe the robots at the Dowco plant will be in my sewing class.

-Alex Brown  

Thats nice.