Holy ebay score, Batman!!

So as I do every few weeks, I was just cruising eBay for anything Boulevard M50 related. I came across this auction a mere hour before time ran out on it. It was for a sissy bar and luggage rack off an '09 Boulevard M50. There was only one picture of it and ridiculously few details. You can see the auction here still probably. So I post a quick question here to find out if the '09 will fit an '06 and get a fast answer that it will. I even double checked with the dealer and they said it would too. So I threw down a bid of $60 at about the 45 second mark. I'm a notorious sniper and that is how I win most of my auctions if I have the chance. I hate giving people the chance to run me up. I win it for $51 with free shipping! You can't beat that! I figured even if it was a cheap Chinese sissy bar then I at least got it for a good deal.

Fast forward a couple days and UPS brings me a box to my office. I open it up and start taking out the pieces. This seems to be a lot higher quality than I expected from a $51 sissy bar. Then I notice the back of the seat rest.



Holy %%%%...! It's a Paladin back rest with luggage rack and quick release brackets! That's like a $500 setup!!! It even seems to have all of the hardware and the key to the quick release!





Now I'm torn as to whether I keep it or flip it! lol It was purchased on a whim. I didn't even have the $50 bucks to pay for it yet. I put one of my vintage Metallica shirts up on ebay the next day and sold it for $50 bucks to cover the cost of the backrest. lol Gotta love vintage stuff... Anyway, I'm pretty stoked. My only dilemma is what I am going to do with it now. I have never had a passenger on my bike in my entire life of riding. I took the rear pegs off my bike three years ago just for a cleaner look and because I wasn't even using a pillion anyway. But now I've got my saddle bags on because it helps me carry my lunch to work with me, so I put the pillion back on and figure I'd complete the look with a sissy bar. I'm just so happy that I didn't have to get a cut rate unit just because I went the cheap route. Every now and then eBay shocks and amazes me... This was a total crap shoot and I hit the friggin' jackpot on this one!



There is hardly a scratch on this thing. I can't believe the owner had it on their bike for very long at all. Based on the other things this seller sells, it must have been either a repo or an auction sale, because nobody who shells out the kind of money this kind of thing costs would have let it go for $50 bucks and not even charged shipping. It probably cost 25 or 30 bucks just to get it to me.  More likely is that he is just a dealership and parts out the accessories that he doesn't want to give away with the bike when he sells that for book value.

It seriously only took like 5 minutes to install. I did it in the parking lot at work with just the same allen key that I used to put the rest of it together. It pops the bags out enough that they don't even come close to rubbing. The only issue I might have is them flapping a bit because they aren't tied down to anything right now. I'll have to look into solutions for that, but right now I don't even feel compelled to get longer bolts to fit the braces.







The other bonus is that since it is a quick release bracket it leaves these knobs that look just like my Cobra bungee knobs that I had on before I put the saddle bag supports on.  So if I wanted to strap something down over the pillion without the backrest on, it would be a piece of cake.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with this.  I've never had anyone on the back of my bike before, but I remember how much I loved getting on my grandpa's bike when I was little.  It didn't happen very often at all, but man was it fun.  My kids would absolutely love a ride on this thing, and now that I have the backrest on it, I feel much less fear that they would fall off.