This is cross posted from my ride report
http://www.yamahasupertenere.com/index.php?topic=5583.0
I thought it might be of interest here...
If you've been following along you will have seen this picture from Mazatlan, where I dropped the bike on a curb. The bag took almost the full weight of bike and gear.
There didn't seem to be too much damage apart from a crease in the front of the bag, so I didn't remove it until I went riding some dirt roads outside Oaxaca, 2000 miles later. I didn't notice anything untoward, but when I put the bag back on, I notice the alloy plate that grips the two rails on the rack, was only grabbing the top one. The lower one was off by a few mm. Some fiddling around with the crank handle and removing and refitting the bag a couple of times didn't correct the situation. I came to the conclusion that "something" had bent in the fall, but I couldn't determine what. Oh well - it had been that way for 2000 miles (or so I thought), it could stay that way until I got a chance to pull things apart and see what the problem was.
I continued the ride across the mountains, and a couple of hundred miles later, this happened...
Lost a Jesse bag!
When I refitted the bag after retrieving it from the ditch, it went back on perfectly! I don't know what the problem was with the clamp mechanism earlier, but must have been "operator error", and was the cause of the bag falling off.
Apart from some scratches, the bag is hardly any worse for wear. The ding at the front is from "the Mazatlan Incident".