Bikepacking - a viable alternative to racks & panniers

cool. i get not all frames are equal so there needs to be enough to accommodate for larger frames, just wanted to sanity check before I took the scissors to it.

Has anyone else had restrap stuff fail miserably?

Two items on one trip failed for us. Hardly used. Rubbish.
Worse thing is they refused to replace one after admitting the zip was faulty.
Don't hold out much hope for the other (dry bag split at seam).

Yes. Dry bag split after a couple commutes while I was testing it out for a tour. Saddlebag holster has wear marks and has frayed where it sits on the post. I didn't have confidence that it would last the 500km tour so I panic bought an apidura saddlebag, which worked really well and was great.

Did you let them know? How did they respond?

IME they’re not fit for purpose.

They've admitted themselves that the dry bags that they had until recently were not up to their own standards and have since brought the production of them in house so that they get the quality they want (i've not tried the new ones myself)
Surprised to hear that they wont fix the bag as they happily replaced a dry bag that failed on me.

IME the rest of the kit has been great quality and the service has certainly not been an issue.

The response to a blown zipper was basically ‘yes, we know, the zips suck. We can give you 10% off a new framebag with a different zip’.

Cool.

Haven’t approached them about the drybag yet. Popped 3 days into our trip. Not ideal.

the dry bags that they had until recently were not up to their own standards and have since brought the production of them in house so that they get the quality they want

I've just bought one - which looks very different from the one in the pictures on their website. Do you know when this quality improvement took place? I wonder if I can trust what I've bought now...

Couple months ago maybe. Ask @TM

Yeah I’d say a month or 2 ago, I reckon if it looks different it’s likely the new ones as they probably won’t have re-shot the new products again, pretty sure they put up a blog about it on their site.

Was it an old frame bag? I understand it’s not great that the zip failed, but zips fail on all sorts of kit if strained.

The guarantee covers all components for 1 year and all manufacturing faults for life.

The dry bag, as a manufacturing fault, would be replaced with a new tapered bag if requested.

Although the component warranty might sound short, it’s better than most/all.

Of course you could argue that you wouldn’t need to warranty it if the zip was different, but it could have broken regardless.

Sorry if it hampered the trip.

My first bikepacking trip with an Archie’s saddlebag the main compression strap’s buckle snapped on day 2 meaning I had to use bungees for the next 10 days. Shit breaks.

On another note did you warranty via sb?

Still need to persuade Nathan at Restrap to repair it.

Someone with a trade account just nudged them for us and hey presto, new stuff!

Not sure i’d use it myself now anyway. The custom alpkit framebag hasn’t missed a beat and I hate bikepacking even when stuff doesn’t break!

Useful having persuasive acquaintances.

Glad to hear you’re happy with the replacement.

Other readers should know it was a 3 year old bag, with a zip they no longer use. The top spec YKK zips they use now weren’t available in small quantities which meant Restrap were unable to use them when they were smaller.

Didn’t @7Üp say that the bag was “hardly used”? So it didn’t have three year’s wear and tear.

Wouldn't it have been a good move to replace the zip with a newer one then?

Covering postage to get the bag back, labour to repair, then postage to return to 7up probably makes it a negligible margin against just replacing the bag with the current spec one

Ya it’d been used very little. A couple of commutes.

The issue wasn’t really that it broke. Shit happens I guess, and they described their zip problem at the time. The issue was that their solution was a shrug and a minor discount on a new one, rather than a repair or replace.

But that’s all sorted now.
Nothing to see here!

I mean in the first place, before they agreed to a new bag

oh yeah for sure, but for some reason they obviously didn't think the incident merited that level of expenditure on their part - if they didn't want to offer replacement entirely, they wouldn't offer that repair either

Do you know if their routes exist somewhere?

Thinking of a 24 L Ortlieb rack pack for my Surly 24-pack rack. Fix it with a bungee cord strap thingy. Should I go for it?

Think this is better off in the rack/ panniers thread
But I'd much rather a bag with straps to attach to the rack. My bigxtop one straps down which is good for canal paths and pot holes which would chuck it about

@7Üp did you send the faulty bits back or keep?

I have some heavy duty zips. Wouldn’t mind tackling a zip replacement to see how painful it is. No probs if you have sent the stuff back/chucked it away already.

Also, seam repair = not difficult (maybe).

I haven't let them know yet. I might do this tomorrow and I'll let you know the response.

@amey, did you solve the Exposure TraceR mounting issue?
Was looking at something more permanent than tape and this Paul Components Gino thing came up, could bolt it to a rack eyelet.

edit: thinking about it, could still run at a funny angle.
Was feeling inspired by the winning TCR setup.

I just used a bit of inner tube as padding and used its normal mount

I have that paul thingy in my parts bin I think if you want.

the winning TCR setup.

Not TraceR though