How much weight can the AS T700 Rear Luggage Rack carry?
By Chris Colling

It's great to see so many people putting our T700 aluminium luggage racks to use, our in box has been filling up with some great bike and gear pics!


BUT, we've also been getting a few questions about how much weight the Rear Top Luggage rack can take. They go something like this...


"Hi Adventure Spec. I am interested in your T700 Rear Top Luggage Rack. I would like to use it for a big trip that will involve dirt riding. I plan to load it up with up to 30/40kg of luggage. Will that be OK?"


So, here's our answer. Warning, you may not like it. 



1. Our racks are NOT designed to take a top box or any hard luggage located to the rear of the mounting bolts.

Due to the Yamaha Tenere 700 design there is no way to support to the rear of this and riding offroad will create heavy forces back there that WILL break a rack.

Maximum load to the rear of the rack is a 1 gallon Rotopax fuel can on their mount. 

2. Our racks are really designed as a point to secure soft luggage.

We strongly encourage riders to pack light to improve their experience.


If you want to take a significant amount of gear loaded to the rear of the bike there are a lot of other options that are designed to take much heavier loads - but they will be a lot heavier.

We have been making parts for travelling offroad in remote places for a long time. As well as the question of whether our rack will take the kind of 30, 40, 50kg loads you're talking about, its important to think about what Yamaha had in mind for the bike. 

We are almost completely sure that the rear end is really not designed for these kind of loads. Its really not long ago when KTM 690 Enduro's were snapping subframes for fun (just Google 'ktm 690 snapped subframe'). 


They're a significantly lighter bike that are very capable off road. When people loaded them up - particularly with top box's and similar loads, then rode them offroad with any vigour, the subframes just gave up. 

BMW R1150GS Adventure's were good at the same trick. 

When you're talking about loading a bike up with around an extra quarter on top of its total mass outside of the bikes wheelbase and outside of solid support points ANY rack is going to act as a lever and levers generate massive forces. 


The key message here is to keep mass centralised on the bike. Side panniers mounted as close to the bikes centre of gravity as possible, with heavy items packed low and ideally near that centre of gravity, are the best place to mount the bulk of your luggage - its worked well on horses for thousands of years! 

The lever effect is also really really significant on the suspension setup, so a bike with that sort of load will be scary to ride offroad. 

Please bare these points in mind when you're making any decisions about how you use your bike.

So, there you go.

Our luggage racks are designed for lightweight adventure riding.

Not heavyweight adventure riding.

LIGHT IS RIGHT


Odoo • Image and Text

Yamaha T700 Rear TOP luggage rack


A powder coated tough flat-plate rear rack incorporating pillion/strapping handles, 4 holes to mount a RotoPax water/fuel tank mount and edge strapping.

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