Functional bikes. Not Porn not Anti

In my experience a basket is much, much better than trying to bungee your shopping bag on a rack. I have a basket on both of my bikes because it increases the carrying capacity immensely.

https://www.copenhagenparts.com/products/bike-porter

They've been round for years. As others have said, as soon as you load them up at all they rotate.

a proper basket is much much much better

Yeah I have one of the Copenhagen ones on my Bianchi and whilst it is fine to hold a backpack on the way to work, it is not up to holding more than 12 beers without feeling sketchy.

...where is pizza rack better than panniers in the back?

Instagram.

Nah but seriously, a basket is so much better than panniers fit shopping, you don’t need to remember to take an empty (or nearly so) pannier to work just to be able to grab some shopping on the way home.

You can also carry big bulky things much easier, I’ve balanced bike box size parcels on my pizza rack/Wald basket combo. Wouldn’t have much luck getting that size of parcel on a pannier rack.

I’ve also loaded it up with panniers to go camping and picked up beers, food, firewood and bottles of water in the basket.

The Wald one looks really nice, sadly it's not too widely available in Poland (most shops only have baskets made of wicker or the high Dutch-bike-style ones.

I found this one, labelled as Medium size, would it work fine? How good is it in terms of bike stability when loaded?

or

I hope it's ok to post my little Eastern Germany shopper among all the £££ bikes in here,
yet this is indeed my winter / "functional" bike - and while on the subject of panniers and baskets and whatnot I was wondering if some of you might have some ideas..

..so you see there's front and back racks, alas they are both quite flimsy.
Well, the main problem with the one one the back is heel strike actually, so there isn't much one can do about this given the geo of the bike.

Was wondering how I could improve the situation in the front - looking for a useful solution that also does not look shit.
I guess some kind of basket would be useful - but how. Mounted at / hanging from the bars as well as sitting on the front rack would be ideal I guess, but have not found anything that would work / fit like that.

Any feedback appreciated!

One front, one back!

Yeah I thought about that (actually in the shoddy part of Berlin where I live it apparently is common practice to just steal one of the plastic baskets from the local supermarket and zip-tie it to one's bike).
As I said there's the problem of heel strike though for anything wider than the rack in the back, and I'd love to have a basket that's easily removable / attachable in the front (so I can take it into the shop).

Vagabond's maiden ride this morning. So nice to ride!

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Bet that rides nice, gotta say though those Botox-wheels combined with the huge, shiny mudguards do look a bit gaudy to me..

The wheels just need destickering, and the front guard could use some tweaking. Other than that, very good! Big tyres plus shiny guards is where it's at.

Promise me to get an additional stay for the rear mudguard before it snaps.
I got one for free direct from GB.

I added the illustration that I sent for GB.
The red highlights the problem, the green is the solution.

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Promise me to get an additional stay for the rear mudguard before it snaps.

Tell me more.

Just edited my post.

The distance between seat stays and mudguard stays together with the angle of mudguards stays make the mudguard prone to bouncing up and down. This will cause a stress breakage of the guard close to the seat stay mounting point.

Easily avoided by fitting an extra stay as pictured above.

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The distance between seat stays and mudguard stays together with the angle of mudguards stays make the mudguard prone to bouncing up and down.

I see. I guess this is (more of) an issue with super compact geos such as your Rawland. I haven't experienced any bouncing so far, possibly due to the steeper seat stays of my horizontal toptube frame. Fingers crossed.

Ok, will do. It seems pretty good with the spacer I fitted down at the chain stays.

My slightly over processed photos probably don't help!

that's beautiful @mi7rennie - lovely job. Is there an opportunity to internally route the rear dynamo cable?

That’s terribly good

Possibly, might need to drill a couple of wee holes.

drill a couple of wee holes

Sounds painful

Nice color! And really like the rear Tubus as a front rack.

I think that's the size I have ziptied to my pizza rack.

Wald's own mounting hardware is a bit 'meh' but if you're attaching it to a pizza rack then it'll be fine.

My 'medium' Timbuk2 courier bag fits perfectly in the basket on it's back if that's any help.

slightly over processed photos probably don't help

Looking forward to black and white pictures of that bike shot with the Rollei in atmospheric wintery landscape
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