staehpj1

The racks I used were the Sunlite ones. I bought a few of them when they were something like $12. Here is a picture where I used a dry bag on the back with the sunlite rack instead of a seat bag. I used a bar roll on the front along with a little REI Flash 18 backpack in this case.




I find the Sunlite can be mounted with p-clamps when there are no canti bosses. I used double p-clamps once on a front mount with little plates for a heavier load on the front, but it is better with the canti bosses.

dgodave

Bikepacking is just a different flavor of touring.

Just like this is a different flavor of touring:

staehpj1

This thread got me thinking about my folding bike. Those little sunlite rackwould probably be great on my old dahon helios. Depending on the amount of gear any or all of the following could be used: a drybag for stuff sack on each sunlite rack front and rear, a bikepacking style seatbag, and a tank bag. If desired the load can be kept low and distributed front and rear.

I don't actually have a trip in mind for this setup at the moment, but can see where it could be a handy setup.

dgodave

Ive toured on it in Japan and England so far. Perfect for "credit card" touring where I can fold it, put the cover on, and bring it on a train or into my BnB room no questions asked. Or even under the table in a pub. I had to mess with the gearing a lot to get the low gears I need for steep hills. Esp in Japan.

The Brompton is tried and true for touring in this style - with the super small fold yet actually viable for long days, which is why I bought it.

PedalingWalrus

tcs

Yeah, it's pretty clear, I ain't on no tour
But I can pack it, pack it, like the style du jour
'Cause I got that trendy gear that all the boys chase
And all the right junk in just the right place
I see the magazines workin' that scene
Sayin’ this is new, not boomer
Come on now, be a zoomer
If you got a bike, just pack it up
And don't you forget that dangle cup
So load it down but keep it lean -



Because you know it's all about those bags
'Bout those bags, not touring
Bikepacking’s about those bags, 'bout those bags, not touring
It’s about those bags, 'bout those bags, not touring
It’s about those bags, 'bout those bags (bags, bags, bags, bags)

- with apologies to Meghan Trainor

Yan 

I needed to buy a saddle bag last month and studied the currently available options. All are hideously expensive, with many pushing $300. I ended up buying a Carradice Camper Long Flap which cost just $130 including shipping from SJS Cycles. I now have three Carradice bags in different sizes and see no reason to depart from this brand. That said, I do like Acorn's large saddlebag.

john m flores 

Brompacking?

Tourist in MSN

I have four Carradice saddle bags if you count the Carradry one. I think that I bought all at Spa. They do not publish a shipping cost to USA, you have to e-mail them for shipping cost.
https://www.spacycles.co.uk/brands/c...saddlebags.php

str

this is not bike packing 😂. it is called: I carry all my house hold.

dgodave

Sure.

Its important have a different word for every variation of every possible flavor of thing.

djb

those lines got some smiles outta me.

but hey, I get the diff type of bags thing. I've been slowly getting some of them here and there, cuz I want to ride places where I know my panniers will get the snot rattled out of them, so will be mixing and matching stuff.
Plus, it will be fun to ride with less stuff.

but its all good, horses for courses and all that, just use the stuff that suits things better.

and in the end, the magazines and you name it has always marketed bikes and bike stuff to be fast and racey and all that, 40, 50 years ago just as today, so nothing new there.

nun

This is a fun chart. I'm quite happy that my setup doesn't exactly appear in it as I like to be different... I suppose the closest is the "All Rounding". I packed my bike and bags up the other day to test out my new Post Carry bag and make sure I was within the airline weight limits, I am. Bike (Specialized Diverge) and bags come in at 40lbs without food and water, which is a couple of pounds heavier than with the Cervelo RS...a lot of that is in the wheels.

As far as saddlebag cost goes Carradice bags are some of the least expensive so look like a great deal. There are certainly lots of other nice saddlebags out there with different materials and options, but they can be expensive. I buy directly from Carradice and have the Nelson and Camper Longflaps, the Lowsaddle Longflap and the Barley. The Barley is getting very worn and so I might replace it with an Audax.

nun

We all have our own pet peeves and this little ditty mentions a couple of mine
1) stuff hanging from bags (particularly cups or mugs)
2) the use of large number of bags strapped to every tube on the bike.

The peeves have some logic to them, but they are mostly just down to my own issues....;-)
The song also skewers some of my own hangups.

indyfabz

As to the first, I am with you. On the last day of our Northern Tier ride, a few of us met a guy who had attached to his panniers and bike countless little toys he had found along the road. And roped on to a rear pannier was a dirty half gallon plastic jug that looked to be weeks old. It was filled with some sort of drink.

As to the second, I see what you did there. I actually hate that tune slightly more than the XS and Os song. A few years ago I was at the Missoula KOA about the start a tour. A duet was playing that night. I went to check them out. They started playing Xs and Os. I quickly texted a bartender friend back in Philly who was working that night. She hates the song as much as I do. She quickly texted me back a photo of one of the bar’s TVs that showed the same song was playing on satellite radio. Freaky.

nun

A playlist is a vital part of my touring gear - but no Mehgan Trainor. I'll usually have some podcasts downloaded, mostly from NPR, BBC or the Guardian, and will listen to BBC Radio4 and a range of music from Babymetal to Beethoven - metal, prog rock, musicals, punk and classical.

IPassGas

My sister would agree with you, always tunes on tour. No disrespect, I want to be part of the outdoors on tour/packing, including what I hear, so for me tunes/etc are a distraction.

tcs

Yeah, the parody song was just for a giggle. It's all good.

We're currently blessed with cycletouring history's greatest selection of bags, racks, containers and styles. I think this new golden age of bike travel snuck up on me.

Tourist in MSN

YES ! ! ! ! !

I recall decades ago trying to figure out how to make a set of panniers from some army surplus cotton canvas bags, the experiment did not go well. A friend of mine and his father did a short bike trip, I was so jealous that they could afford the pannier bags that Gerry Sports made. His father stored his bike in the family dining room at home, he had a 1970s Raleigh touring bike with a triple crank.

A decade and a half ago, I finally bought a set of Ortliebs, that was when you could still buy them from a European seller to have them shipped to USA. There were not many choices at that time, but I am still using them.

Now, however some manufacturers are dropping touring bikes from their inventory, not sure where the future will be.

nun

They are just rebranding touring bikes as gravel bikes or adventure bikes. I know that's not really true and a conventional touring bike has some specific qualities, but bikes sold as gravel bikes do have lots of mounting points, low gearing and clearance for wide tires. But you'll have to call what you are doing bikepacking rather than touring...and we are back to the origin of this thread.

cyccommute 

Okay, that must have been many, many decades ago. I started touring in the late 70s and there were lots of pannier choices from places like Bike Warehouse (later Bike Nashbar). Here’s a 1980 Bike Warehouse catalog showing Cannondale panniers for $45 (about $165 in today’s dollars). They weren’t so expensive that I couldn’t afford them on my wife’s salary (I was a student at the time).

Why were you getting them from Europe at that late date? I was using Ortliebs…replaced the Cannondales from the 80s…for the first time in 2003. I’m fairly sure I got mine from REI. There were a whole lot of other choices in 2003 including “water proof” bags from Nashbar for a fraction of the Ortliebs. My yellow Ortliebs…front, rear, and handlebar bag…are still around and going strong. They’ve seen a lot of miles and I’d still use them but they don’t match the color scheme on my touring bike…gotta do things in style

A whole bunch of people riding around on bikes that are less than optimal for touring…just like in the 70s. Worst “touring” bike I ever used was a Univega Sportour which was a short wheel base platypus that was sold as a “fast touring bike”. It was a handful on a 7% grade 2 mile downhill from the top of Crow Hill to Bailey along US285 here in Colorado. I was very happy when I dropped that bike into a pothole and bent the frame back…making the wheelbase even shorter…and got to replace it with a Miyata 610 which was longer and nicer to ride. I eventually replaced that one with an even longer…and better…Cannondale touring bike in 2003.

Tourist in MSN

In the early and mid 70s, the only panniers I was familiar with were Gerry Sports. Bike Warehouse? I never heard of them, but that was clearly pre-internet. Back then if you had not heard of a catalog seller, where were you going to hear of them? I learned of REI from another student that had a REI tent, he told me about REI, I joined a few months later, that was in 1976. And that was the first year I went backpacking in the Rockies, at that point I lost interest in bike touring until about 20 years ago. First bought some Nashbar panniers and then the Ortliebs a bit less than two decades ago.

The reason that Ortlieb told their retailers in Europe to stop shipping to customers in USA was because there were a lot of people like me that were buying Ortliebs from Europe at a substantial discount to the prices charged in USA where the markups were much higher. And USA distributors complained to Ortlieb about that, so Ortlieb to keep peace with their retailers in USA told the Europeans to stop shipping here, I think that was roughly a decade ago.

I just checked Bike24.com (Germany), they want 101.67 Euros for a pair of Yellow Backrollers. Converting to USD using Reuters, that is $108.38 USD for the Backrollers. Every time I have ordered something from them, the shippign fee was a flat $20 Euros, so, that would be less than $130 USD if they were allowed to ship to USA. REI wants $200 for those Backrollers. REI sometimes has Ortliebs discounted at about 20 percent off, but that is still higher, and that would include sales tax.

I think my Ortliebs were from Wiggle.com but that was so long ago I do not recall where I got them, Wiggle had free shipping to USA on larger orders at that time.

cyccommute 

Magazines. Bike Warehouse usually did several page spreads in Bicycling Magazine each month. I think they also did smaller ads in Bike Centennial’s magazine. Supergo, which later became Performance, was also around in that era.

I didn’t get into bicycling until 77 with dabbling in touring around 78/79. I did started reading Bicycling Magazine fairly early on and was aware of all kinds of bicycle touring equipment since that was only a year later than Bike Centennial’s popularity spike due to the Bicentennial. I read…and probably still have…Frank Berto and Jim Blackburn’s ground breaking article on lowriders.

BobG

Back in the 60s I subscribed to a regional California publication called "American Cycling Newsletter", later shortened to "American Cycling" which later evolved into "Bicycling"...



It was full of ads for mail order houses that even pre-dated Bike Warehouse (Nashbar) which didn't arrive until the 70s. @Tourist in MSN, I believed you said you once worked at "Wheel Goods"? Here's their 1967 ad, and out in Stuart's neck of the woods there was "Big Wheel Ltd" in Denver, as well as my high school years employer "Mel Pinto Imports" ...



Apologies for straying from thread topic. Now back to our regularly scheduled program on "bike-packing"!

Tourist in MSN

Yup, worked there part of the year in 1973. Graduated high school in 1972, worked in a factory for part of the time hydraulic equipment and then was hired at Wheel Goods until the end of summer, at that point I had saved up enough money to start college, and started at the U of Minn.

The only touring bike model that Wheel Goods sold was a Raleigh that had a triple, I think it had a TA crank. It might have used Huret derailleurs, but memory of obscure things like bike models has a tendency to fade after a half century so I could be wrong.

It was a Raleigh shop, also sold Gitanes, their in-house brand Hosteler, and I think that was about it. Might have sold Robin Hood too? They also had a huge warehouse of obscure parts and had catalog sales. The owner had regional multi-state distributorship for Raleigh and maybe some other brands. When the manufacturers started to sell directly to dealers, the owner saw his income plummet, so he closed down then, I think that was late 1970s. Our big competitor was Penn Cycle that sold Peugeot, Schwinn, maybe a few other brands.