that's gonna be pretty cool

 

Hey Mike,

I've had bags and fairing for at least a couple years now and have been considering your route for a while. Of course, owning the big rear tire bike, I can't find a fender overlay to save my azz.

I remounted my HD leather bags with Easy Brackets for detachability, and have considered doing the same with hard bags.... but the need for the fender fillers just seem to make it not worth while, as if they stay on then what's the point? That said, I would bet you could somehow weld/fabricate the hard bag brackets onto a set of Easy Brackets due to the large amount of metal they have.

The fairing was easy... Memphis shades has the easiest solution. I just reworked the existing brackets to fit and mount on the stock detachable windshield mounts. Did have to move my signals to the lower mount bolt as they were hidden behind the fairing on the handlebar mounts.

Your route is similar to what I was thinking, however I wanted to go with the stretched bags and cutouts for the pipes in the back. Don't want to lose the stock ability so modifying my rear fender is out of the question... thus, the idea of buying a replacement to attach an overlay to. Problem is none of the mfgrs of these products make one for the 200mm rear tire bike... that means cutting one in half and widening it, and I just don't know if it would last that way.

I'm also in something of a quandry about the "gap", or visual hole, in front of the bags. The touring bikes have a side cover there that hides the fuse panel and other stuff; the softail has the oil tank but then it just seems to have something missing toward the bottom front of the bag. Was wondering if a touring panel could be fabbed up to fit, or something similar made?

This conversion is a big undertaking. Considering the mounting brackets are anywhere from $200 to 300, the true duals (only way to go) are $600 to 900 with mufflers, the bags, the fender filler, the paint and moulding... and a batwing too. Wow, easy to get well over 2k invested pretty quick.

I love my fat tired Fatboy, but the cost of doing this conversion right makes me think maybe just trading it in favor of a SG, and building an old Fatboy typed Shovel bar hopper might be the smarter way to cover my bases and scratch my itch to work on a bike at the same time.

 

Have the Softail Standard. Swapped out the 21" wheel for a Heritage 16". Now the headlight looks WAYYYY too tiny. Can a Heritage 7" mount up or is there a lot of issues with the mounting blocks? Thanks.

 

Mike, nice bike. I'm doing the same thing to my 05 Standard. I put a 16 on front and have the fairing, bags, 7 inch headlight, turn signal relocation kit & fatboy fenders. What filler panel are you using on you rear fender? That looks good. I was going to go with Cycle Vision's fillers but I like what you've done.

 

Nice job. Be sure to post pics when you finish.

 

Citykid, I just mounted a 7 inch headlight off of a Fatboy on my 05 Standard and it bolted right up with no mods or no clearance issues. I unbolted my 5 3/4 and just let it hang and then bolted the 7 inch up. I didn't mess with any wires untill I knew for sure it bolted up with no issues. Hope this helps ya.

 

Where did you get the filler panels? I puuting hard bags on my 03 FLSTS this winter and thought about those but I wanten the to mount to the bags and not the fender, so I can take the bags off.

 

I too am interested on converting my FXST to a fat boy front wheel set-up. Can you tell me how you did yours? Do I need to change forks or is it as simple as replacing with a fatboy wheel and tire? thanks for any info, Dennis
muckitymuc@comcast.net

 

You might want to look at the Breakaway throttle asist it is quantily build easy to install maybe not the cheapest one around but it is cheaper then the Harley electical one.

 

why do I like the look of this ugly photoshop mock up you did ? I must be getting older.. ****... .. I really like it.. and... I hate myself for saying that .