My Good Old LT: The hitch and what is hanging on it

Already back in 2005-2006 I started planning some kind of additional luggage rack for our longer trips. So started searching for some trailer hitches as I figured that is a good starting point for fixing the luggage rack on the bike. I had seen them on GoldWings but at that time there were none available for LT's.

Somehow I spotted an ad either on eBay or BMWLT.com classified about a used Dauntless LT trailer hitch for sale. The seller was kind enough to ship it all the way to Finland and to my pleased surprise this hitch was already equipped with a square receiver tube instead of the regular hitch ball. At that time I was not in favor of purchasing a trailer.

Here is the hitch itself. The previous owner had installed a plastic mud flap extension on the Dauntless tubes and as this seemed to work well with preventing the water from spraying all over I left this in place.The receiving tubes (with plastic caps) are already installed in the bike. The power socket can be seen on the right. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the set before installation but if you make a Google search with "dmc trailer hitch K 1200 LT" you will get plenty of pictures. You can also try with the older brand name "dauntless trailer hitch K 1200 LT"

Here is a good side view of my Dauntless (later DMC) hitch and receiver in place. That summer I also had the Remus exhaust pipe for 2 months. Until I got fed up with the rumble it made at typical touring speeds of 100 km/h...
What I like with this Dauntless /DMC hitch is that it is easy to remove when not used and leaves the bike looks practically intact.

As in every project, proper planning is half of the success. So I started making some 3D-sketches of my rack with my AutoCad...

This was my final design of the rack. The bike parts (rear tire, exhaust, trunk) are pretty simple as you can see...;-)

Here was the frame.

This described the Delsey suitcase I was planning to mount on the rack. Since the weight of the bag could be up to 20 kg I needed the cables that would give support from the top as well.

And here was the ready version 1.0. (I later replaced the cable fastening with different system so that I could avoid using the spreading bar.) I added an extra brake light and side marker lights to the rack since the power for these was easy to get from the power socket that came with the hitch.
The rack frame was not built by me but by an associate stainless steel professionals who build bakery ovens as their daily business.

I even had a 12 V fridge/cooler that would fit on the rack. To be honest I never really used it though...

Later I modified the upper fastening points in such way that I could avoid using the "spreading bar" for the cables as this was pretty much on the way of removing and putting in place of the Delsey bag.

I designed a "V-shaped" steel bar out of a 5 x 30 mm flat steel.

...like this, I made 10 mm threaded holes and welded U-shaped hooks at the ends of the V-bar.

The V-bar is fastened of these steel bars that were originally made for relocating the trunk 30 mm further backwards from the factory rear position. You can read that story here

And here is a close-up of how the bar is fastened on the bike.

And this is what the hitch rack looks like from the side. I had a black vinyl cover / hood made for the Delsey flight bag. This protects the bag from rain etc. BTW, when I had the Remus exhaust (without the catalytic converter) for the one summer, it contaminated the bag with very heavy exhaust fumes smell. When I returned back to the OEM exhaust this problem was mostly gone.