Leaning SV650 Sidecar – Matt Does Stuff

I had a great dog named Bogart. Bogie loved to be doing whatever I was doing, and loved to ride along. He rode in the boat (any boat!), a kayak, in the Miata with the top down. Always head out the window in the car. On the boat he would head right to the front, a friend called him the hood ornament.

I had seen a few dogs in sidecars and decided I wanted to build one of my own. But not a normal sidecar, which is fixed to the bike and causes all kinds of handling differences and limitations. A leaning sidecar, in which the motorcycle still leans side-to-side as usual and the sidecar pivots underneath. There are very few of these in the U.S. and none that I have found in the world on a Suzuki SV650.

I like a challenge so I set to sketching up how it would work. A couple years of tinkering and Bogie was getting older so I got to it. There was an active forum about sidecars at AdventureRider where I learned quite a bit on design and construction of sidecars. Only a few of them were leaners though, and none had intentionally set up the mechanics of the sidecar to understand how it works with the bike. I wrote a journal there as I designed and built, and the community was pretty helpful.

Most of the construction was done around 2014-2015. I sourced all the hardware, cut everything to size, coped the tube, and had a friend weld it together. I built the body like a kayak with a ~50’s inspired fender, and a Cragar-looking mag wheel. The suspension is a single torsion unit for a small utility trailer.

Handling is way sketchy! It likes to have a little weight in it, and it’s super wide to allow for space as the bike leans to the right. There is a lag or lead effect due to the offset weight when accelerating or decelerating. And depending on loading and tire pressure there’s a resonance that transmits into head shake on the bike side.

I used it on and off for a couple years until Bogart was too old to ride along anymore.