Good Thinking

Karen Ramsay innovates, adapts and overcomes.

- Karen Ramsay

For all the people spending on farkles, repairs and accessories there’s just as many going with DIY options. Some may call it penny pinching, others might call it problem solving, but whatever name you give to it, ‘hacks’ can be pretty ingenious.

Basically hacks are solutions or work-arounds and can be divided into four main categories: necessity, innovation, multipurposing, and tightarse. From simple ones like rolling your clothes instead of folding them or carrying a moisturiser that also doubles as sunscreen and can be used to lube the tyre when you get a flat, there’s so many amazing ideas out there we should be sharing them.

I’m not recommending you try any of these hacks; I just wanted to share a small snippet of the ingenuity of adventure riders.

Spilled milk

The first hack falls into the penny-pinching category.

Dave and I keep saying one day we’ll get ourselves some good-quality pannier bags, and the main reason we haven’t is probably because our hack is working really well.

What we have is a 20-litre Aldi dry bag which sits in a 20-litre, square-based oil drum cut on the diagonal and bolted to the pannier racks. It’s tied on with a strap and a couple of occy straps and is simple, cheap and works well. They’re quite resilient and waterproof, and I’ve tested them with a number of drops in various conditions – rocks, rivers, sand – and they’re still going strong.

Friends Kylie and Greg have been riding for years but are fairly recent converts to adventure riding. They have a number of hacks, including a common one involving panniers and containers.