The New And Improved Unofficial R65 Forum V2
Technical Discussion => BMW Technical Q&A, Primarily R65 => Topic started by: scottyintex on May 30, 2007, 10:22:18 PM
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Had the sidecar on a year now and love it. Disappointed with way the Cozy sidecar held up. It has developed three...............yep three stress cracks. Next week I am taking the sidecar off and welding the cracks shut. Also going to weld reinforcing plates over the areas where the cracks occurred, seems to me hairline crack like to come back. Also going to reinforce every area where a bolt goes through the sidecar, just preventive maintenance. For those of you who don’t know a Cozy is an Indian made copy of a German Steib. Go with a Steib, even if it is about $3000.00 dollars more.
When you run a extra headlight, taillight on a sidecar rig in town, with stop and go traffic, it pulls your battery down, way down. Have been tinkering with the lights on my bike. The whole thing was looking for brighter lights, also hunting a lower power requirement but that was secondary to brightness. Here is what I have learned so far.......most of it is just common sense ............ but I just had to experiment. I tried a LED fog light on the sidecar........... didn’t work worth a flip. A flashlight would have worked much better.
I tried LED turn lights....they did work ok but just not as bright. Paid $15.00 bucks for two but just looked too washed out in daylight and I put the old .89 cent bulbs back in. Takes a lot of LED’s to be as bright as a 21 watt incandescent bulb.
Now the LED taillights did make a big improvement. I was very pleased with the way they turned out. The Xenon headlight bulb did make a difference too, again was pleased with the way it worked, is a good bit brighter. Maybe not as bright as they say but definitely brighter. When your on a cycle brighter is good.
In the end I couldn’t lower my power draw enough........LED’s did help....so I went with a omega charging system and the problem was solved. And a sidecar is totally cool!!!!!! As far as I can tell it has put no strain on the cycle...other than it runs slower up the hills and ya need more room to pass.
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Man, that is too bad about the sidecar stress cracks - I know that a number of the older ones could also be
prone to that but they were supposedly not always built with the best choice of material. Looking at the
cozy sidecar website it seemed they almost bragged about how sturdily built their products were.
I was thinking that if I decided to put a hack on my R65, or any airhead, that the classic Steib "bullet"
looked the coolest. That model of Cozy does look the part - too bad that you had a fairly unpleasant
experience with it. It certainly tends to make me shy about taking the plunge, even with an attractive
price tag.
The LED tailights would also be the way that I'd go to, along with an Omega charging system and
perhaps a lawntractor battery wired in parallel in the boot of the sidecar..