I took off the shocks yesterday and measured the distance of mounting points when the fender sat on the tire... and can you believe it? Forgot the number... (is there a facepalm emoticon?)

I must be getting old...

Tried to compress the shock with a spring compressor i have for cars, but it's a no-go. I'm lucky it did not jump off the vice and took my head in the process. Then I tried to compress it on the bike and fix it with some luggage straps but it still has enough travel in the spring to prevent from reaching the nut under the top eyelet.

(There is a how to in the suspension section about those shocks, the top eyelet is fixed on the shaft by a thread and there's a locknut that hides under the rubber stop)

My idea was to pull it apart, dig up some rubber suspension bits from the odd boxes I have in odd corners for all the bits that "might come handy someday"... slap it together, and voila limited travel! Well. No.

Mike, I'm 100kg (about 220lbs?) without riding gear and my suspension never bottomed out even on softer setting (It was on the hardest, but one notch back) I mean it when it still had the original fender where wheel can travel more up into the bike. Of course, It's an old bike, and who knows how big the previous owner was and what shocks he fitted. It just looks original. (previous seller was an old man with a big belly, well north of 100kg. But he had the bike only for a year or so.

When I hade the wife sit on the rear fender it compressed only about a cm, so it's pretty dram stiff now. With the new fender I managed to get the rear tire rub on a bigger bump once. Then I clicked the suspension to a harder setting (to max) and this is where we are. I'm pretty sure that I will hit the fender every now and then if i add the luggage, so something should be done.

I'll try to get the measures of the marauder shocks (I think they are like an inch longer) as that i can get off the local ebay. The neat new things you often mention (412Progressive) are kinda prohibitively expensive to get here. And I'll get the shocks off to measure the allowed minimum eye-to-eye distance Was it 22cm...? Darn!

Even found a decent place for the toolkit

bags can be extended to a total of 40L, that's probably enough underwear to drive down to Johannesburg!

Thanks Tocsik, I got really lucky with those bags!

Tested the bike's suspension with a 15kg bag of pellets on the rack. Sadly rear tire hits on the fender on bigger bumps so i need longer shocks, no way around it.

Also tested the heated grips... First time i had such thing on a bike and it's a really wonderful feeling. First time I had numb hands that are also warm!

In case someone is interested making heated grips themselves:

- about 1m length of resistance wire (constantan wire, styrofoam cutting wire etc) per grip. Wire is 12ohm per meter, so 1 grip is 12ohms, taking about 1A, so about 12-14W
- wrapped textile backed insulator tape on the handles, wrapped the 1m wire so that the ends are next to each other at the inner end of the grip. (so a long U loop) Secured the end of the long U-loop with a bit of tape.
- Soldered some not too thick wires to them and fixed it with a zip-tie.
- used 50mm shrink tube and a gas burner to have a rubbery surface that fixes the heating wires.
- got a switch for it (only ON-OFF but a lower setting IS useful. After 10kms I turned it off as it was becoming too hot) The switch got fixed under the console on the left.
- power is taken from the position light circuit through a 5A breaker. This way I won't leave it on by mistake after turning off ignition. This was just simple for me as I had free connections for the taillight as I no longer have a separate numberplate light.

Not too pretty but works.
Considering that such stuff from Oxford is like 50 usd, you might not want to play with it, but the total cost for me was about 15usd and I have still enough wire and heatshrink tube left for 3 bikes.

I put some shrink tube on the switch itself to make it watertight. I bought a watertight switch together with the rest of electric bits, but after receiving it I went to get a switch from a local car parts shop. Some of them are just horrid quality. I trust this solution much more.

used the free connection in the white connector (taillight) and put a 5A circuit breaker in there.
It's all very simple, just an ON_OFF switch. After experimenting with it I'd say You could really use an ON_OFF_ON switch and either make it 2 circuits and switch between paralel / serial connections of the grips (that's the simple method used even by Oxford) or add an extra resistor If you have a box of old parts and some chunky 10-20ohm resistors...

I did not want to believe that 10-15W per grip will do anything too warm but it does get too warm. Mind you, I also used a muff on the handlebars, so if you keep hands out in the elements, you might want all the Watts.

Do it yourself heated grips.  

No, I get numb hands regardless of temperature. Probably something to do with my hands. It has been always like that on different bikes, different weather, sometimes even in the car...

No, if you get heated palms it's like a really neat way to keep the cold out of your fingertips. I was sceptical a bit about it at first, thinking that riding gloves would insulate but i used my summer gloves (just leather, minimal filling) and a muff on the handlebars (some el cheapo Oxford stuff i got ages ago). After 10kms I turned off heating as it was getting too hot! Mind you it was -1 Celsius and I used those muffs so no wind was around my hands.

If you are interested, I used this description as aid for design:
https://atrophy.lock.net/do/hotgrips.html

I omitted the Hi-Low settings, just having an On-Off, but I do advise having Hi-Low, and then you do not even need the switch to be at hand, can be hidden someplace else and just turn it to Low after like 10minutes .