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  • carrying luggage off road
  • mattsccm
    Free Member

    The current trend seems to be for a whopping big dry bag held on with a harness. What’s so wonderful about that compared to an old fashioned rack?
    I am talking about a hard tail, I know racks are not an easy option with suspensions.
    Seems to me that modern harness jobbies put the weight higher than a rack. Indeed the same weight in a Carradice which is lower than the modern stuff is more noticeable than on a rack. Doubt the extra couple of hundred grams in a rack matters, nor as far as I can see is it in the way.
    I do suspect I am missing a point somewhere though. Please give me a reason to spend/waste money. 🙂

    whitestone
    Free Member

    My bikepacking kit of handlebar harness & bag (13L), frame bag (4L) and saddle harness/bag (13L) gives me slightly more capacity than just one of my pannier bags but distributes the weight around the bike a lot better. Actually the weight isn’t huge, depending on time of year, temperature, etc. it’s usually somewhere between 4 – 8 Kg.

    The heavy denser stuff is in the frame bag. The handlebar bag has sleeping kit in it and even for winter it weighs less than 2Kg. While I can use up to 13L in the seat bag it’s usually about 8L of clothes.

    If you have to do any hike-a-bike then the bikepacking setup is much easier to handle than panniers.

    It’s quite possible that when bikepacking started the bikes didn’t have mounting points for racks so the early participants looked for a different way to attach bags. It’s not new though – Australian itinerant farm workers had similar setups way back in the late 19th century.

    Edit: I should say that I do have rack and panniers and for on-road touring they’d be my first choice.

    jamiep
    Free Member

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    gofasterstripes
    Free Member

    I added a second pair of rack clips to each of my Ortliebs and they stay on through some serious abuse. I rode quite a bit of SW coast path like that, fully rigid.

Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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