Well, so much for getting the bike back together with the newly painted tins this weekend.

Some of you may recall my issue with the rear fender sub-frame last spring. If not, the recap is it's made of cheap-@$$ Chinese pot metal and the strut bolts will strip out in a heartbeat. Heli-coils held for about a month, then I had to hog the holes out even more to install Big-Serts which left next to nothing of the original threaded square blocks (you could literally see the threads on the outside of them after tapping the enlarged hole).

So guess what happened when I went to mount up my saddlebag brackets tonight. Yep..that's right, the Big-Serts spun themselves right out as well.

I'm done with it for the night. Tomorrow I'll pull the rear fender back off, remove the sub-frame and do what I should have done last spring. Time to break out the grinder and then weld in some new blocks made of real steel. I would just go with nylock nuts on the back side but trying to get my hand and a wrench up in there w/o pulling the wheel would be next to impossible. I don't want that hassle every time I want to pull the bags.

I happen to have a subframe from my '03 taking up garage space...

i was able to get a wrench on the backside with tire on., my old sub frame did the same as yours. i ended up used lock washer/nut/red locktite and i was able to get a wrench in there to the brackets up. but now im back to normal - new fender bought had sub frame included.

Yeah, but I'm running Jay's bag mounts that are a solid piece of 1/4" aluminum plate that extends down to the axle nut? Neighbor kids hand might be able to squeeze up in there with a wrench but mine sure won't. lol

MrFurious wrote:
Yeah, but I'm running Jay's bag mounts that are a solid piece of 1/4" aluminum plate that extends down to the axle nut? Neighbor kids hand might be able to squeeze up in there with a wrench but mine sure won't. lol

Why can't you just grind off the thread blocks and weld on nuts in it's place? Or take a piece of 3/8" bar stock weld it and then drill and tap to your thread of choice?

hardone2get wrote:
MrFurious wrote:
Yeah, but I'm running Jay's bag mounts that are a solid piece of 1/4" aluminum plate that extends down to the axle nut? Neighbor kids hand might be able to squeeze up in there with a wrench but mine sure won't. lol

Why can't you just grind off the thread blocks and weld on nuts in it's place? Or take a piece of 3/8" bar stock weld it and then drill and tap to your thread of choice?

That's pretty much what I plan on doing (see last paragraph of first post).