Porteur bag made from pizza delivery bag

I found that in order to take advantage of the usefulness of the excellent custom porteur rack that Alistair Spence built for my Nishiki, I needed some kind of porteur bag. After pondering making or commissioning a high-class canvas porteur bag, I decided that it would make sense to adapt a pizza bag.

The pizza bag has a few distinct advantages over a classy bag - it is cheap ($25.50 at Bag Solutions, https://www.bagsolutions.com/comersus/store/comersus_viewItem.asp?idProduct=230 ); it is easily replaceable; not so attractive to thieves, and tending to make my nice bike look less appealing too; and the synthetic materials are lightweight. It is lined with thick foam for insulation that is useful as padding as well. Here it is, when empty:

I removed the foam insulation from the top half of the bag, where it wasn't doing much for cushioning but made the bag a lot bulkier. I added four grommets so that I could bolt it to the eyelets on the rack. I cut the shoulder straps and added Fastex buckles - the straps are adjustable so that the opening can be adjusted and the straps can be pulled snug to secure loads.

Because the sides of the bag are loose, and I don't want my tools and things that I carry around to bounce out or slide around, I also made a small zippered musette bag out of lightweight cotton canvas duck. This was made from scratch, and very crudely. This bag is also useful because I can leave the bike outside and carry the musette with all my contents with me.

Here is the bag semi-full with a reasonable load of groceries:

An odd-shaped cargo of some kind:

A very large box. The bike handled really badly with the load centered way out front like that, but I made it home anyway.

A couple of rolls of 36" x 48" drawings. There were several rolls of 18" drawings inside the bag underneath the large rolls as well:

QR lever added to prototype decaleur

Something I've been wanting to do for a long time, I finally got a quick-release cam lever to replace the nut and bolt I was previously using to fasten my decaleur to the headset-mounted cable hanger. This means I can rapidly get the bag on and off the bike without any tools, and the QR cam should be more secure than the nut and bolt was.

Here's a link to the original decaleur solution, which shows off how the decaleur works a bit more clearly. Below are some snapshots of the QR. I sawed a notch into the cable hanger so that the M5-threaded bolt can get into and out of the hanger, just like an axle into a dropout.

Here's where I bought the cam lever.

The snapshots:

Acorn Boxy Bag mini pump hack

I hacked my Acorn Boxy Bag, or more specifically the corrugated plastic stiffener I added (which was described in an earlier post here), to support my mini pump. Until now, I had kept the mini pump loose in the main section of the bag, because it's too long to fit in the front pocket where I keep all my tools and spares. Having the pump loose in the main compartment was inelegant, so I added a couple of grommeted holes to the stiffener with two loops of elastic shock cord to hold the pump above the front pocket below the flap. The pictures will explain it.

This is pretty rudimentary stuff, but I thought I would share it here because seeing it might give any readers out there some ideas for similar hacks to suit their own needs.

If I were really enterprising, I would sew something that attached the other contents of the front pocket (spare tube, VAR tire iron/bead jack, Alien multitool, peanut butter wrench, and patch kit) to the stiffener, so that I could pull out and replace the whole kit at once.

Tarik Saleh Reports on the New Cycle Truck

Mad scientist and bicycle-human Tarik Saleh was in town to eat tacos (and other reasons) a couple weeks ago and took the New Cycle Truck for a test ride, something we'd been discussing for about two years before it finally happened. I enjoyed his review of the bike and his ruminations on tacos. It's on his Moscaline blog:

http://tsaleh.blogspot.com/2010/04/james-black-cycletruck-taco-experience.html

Small front rack action shot

Garrett reminded me that there was an awesome action shot from when I went mountain-testing the Small Bag Rack with the Acorn Boxy Bag on it. This image was shot by Esteban (Protorio) on the Rivendell Riders group ride in September 2009:

See Flickr for the full-size and the rest of Esteban's photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25671211@N02/3894982599/in/set-72157622155202441/

A Saddlebag Support for Mitch

Our new friend Mitch, of Nine Mile Images, in Syracuse requested a saddlebag support like the one we made for my Panasonic. I adjusted the design to suit the smaller frame size.

Here are pictures taken by Mitch of the rack installed:

Cycle Truck Adapted from BMX Bike in Haiti

I received a very nice email this morning from Ben, who is working for a relief and development organization in Haiti and promoting the adaptation of cargo bikes on the side. He built a surprisingly elegant cycle truck by converting a BMX bike. Pictures and a description of his process appear on Instructables:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-build-a-cargo-truck-bicycle/

Admirable!