Motorcycle Magician part 1

So with just a week left, I'm furiously preparing my gear for the long 1500 mile trip to Los Angeles.

For those of you who don't know, I will be making this trip on a motorcycle, a Honda Shadow Spirit 750 to be exact. I've been working on the bike itself, trying to come up with ideas on how to get everything (and myself) on it safely, and I think I've got everything just about worked out. The hardest part of this has not been figuring out how to pack the bike though. The hardest part has been figuring out how to pack my table and gear.

Now my table is a 32" trey table, the kind the waiter uses to bring you your food at a restaurant. The table top is simply a 20"x19" piece of covered plywood.

Now I know what you're thinking: "Why don't you just get a new table out in LA and save yourself the hassle?" The answer is simple: I'll still have to transport the table on the bike in LA. So to solve this problem, here is what I did:

The table top itself I cut into fourths and hinged two pieces together and then latching the two hinged pieces to each other. This has worked out great because the table top folds up into a 10" square (more or less) and is easily portable. The downside is that it is a little flimsy. I'm working that part out by shimming the top a bit to add more tension and create a more stable top.

In the future, I would instead cut the board in half and have two long sections that latched together. A bit less portable, but not by much.

The trey stand itself was a bit more interesting. I started with the idea to cut the legs below the rivet (the one that lets the legs make the "x") and hinge them so they folded up nicely. Turns out finding hinges that small (and sturdy enough) is extraordinarily difficult. My next idea was to simply put pegs in the legs allowing everything to pop together nicely. That didn't turn out as well as I had planned. The final idea (which worked) was to latch them together using trunk latches (they're called drawer latches, but I've never seen a drawer with one).

So the final product is a table with legs cut at an angle (to allow better support when unfolded) latched together with trunk clasps. And it works beautifully.

In the future I would make sure that the cuts are all perfect. My table works great, it's just more of an aesthetics thing.

So, I'm going to be latching the folded up table and table top to the bike and it should work great. I'll post more about how it actually worked once I ride the bike with the table strapped to it.