Love it! Love it! Love it!
Very practical and useable and less obtrusive than most top boxes. Added to that, you'll find that it will be much, much more FE than a saddle box or bag or a traditional box that sits behind the pillion seat. In fact, looking at the picture and where you'll be seated on the bike in a forward position, it looks to me that you'll significantly lower the drag when riding on the highway.
I'm the one with the milk-crate-type that's strapped to the pillion portion of the seat on a CTX700. My bike makes my installation easy, because the entire seat comes off via a keyed latch. I just took the seat off and used lashing straps to wrap the crate around the seat exactly where I want it to sit. I use one piece of twine in the back around the license plate holder, but your underside picture gives me an idea for more stability and better look, because I too have pillion grab bars and so I can hook/bolt around my grab handles and delete the twine.
I need no more than a crate, because I can garage my bike at home and at work, but back before I tried to sell my CTX700, I had a similar box to yours strapped to my seat. What I ended up finding was a Dewalt Tough System 08204. It was very strong and water tight and ended up being about 55-liters. The biggest fault in the Dewalt box was that, being designed as a tool box first, it had some grooves and indentions in it that made it a bit smaller on the inside than on the outside. I took a knife and cut out the grooves and ended up with a suitable 55-liters. I don't have pictures of my bike with the box, because my computer has since crashed and I had deleted them from my camera.
When I went to the FE Challenge in mid-Ohio 2014, I had that Dewalt box on my seat and a short windshield. I tucked during the ride and achieved 96.9 mpg by my own recording data. Keep in mind, this is a 670 cc motorcycle. I am confident that without this box, combined with tucking, I could have achieved no more than 83 mpg on that bike, because that's as high as I'd ever achieved and that was on friendlier mpg rides than the Vetter Challenge ride.
I desparately want to build a tail like Sendler, because I feel my mpg can be optimized further with a tapering tail that will be even more useful than my crate, but I don't have his skills, and I've got to do some drag research, as one can make things worse if one is not careful. One must know the distance and angle to taper, lest turbulence could actually be made worse than stock. I also have to figure out how to build a tail that will allow me to easily remove it for weekly chain maintenance via a lift stand or build it so I don't have to remove it.
Again, love your box. Great job!
