I just made my own alloy pannier. They are in Aluminium. I have bean told to use the type 5005 (that means semi-hard, and 'eloxed' = anodised). I used pop rivets to fix the things. You can find picture here :

http://www.petiteviree.com/images/moto/boites/index.php

They are currently not really tested (only 600km in france), and I hope they are strong enough : tomorrow we should take the bikes from the Buenos Aire airport and use them through argentina.

Severin.

nice!

Hi DIY bikers,

after one year and 38 000kms, here is a small 'debriefing' post about my home made panniers.
The difficult part for me was to know what was 'strong enouth'. I had planned to test them before the trip, but time goes so fast that the panniers were finished the last day before our departure.

The major problem we had was with the silent blocks I used to fix the side panniers to bike. They broke one pannier during the first 20k of gravel road in Argentina... So my advice would be to avoid silent blocks, or take really big one (2cm diameter). Silent blocks are rather expensive, and maybe not that usefull. After that I removed them and used bolts instead. No problems.
I also added an iron bar to hold the panniers a bit better (see first pict).

IMPORTANT : we were very lucky that the pannier fixation did not broke earlier, e.g. : when we were on the 6 lane ring road around Buenos Aires, or on the highway in France. Just imagine having one side pannier leaving your bike when you are driving at 120km/h, with some buses/cars/trucks behind. It could be very dangerous, so you should really try to test them fully loaded on a empty road, or even better : overloaded on a bad track.

The panniers themselfs were ok, so the 1.5mm alu is really fine. As you can see on the pictures here, you should put a second layer of alu where the panniers are fixed to the bike. On the side where there is no second plate, the alu broke arround the washers at the end of the trip, after >20 000kms, on the other side (last pict), it was ok.

You will find more picts here : http://www.petiteviree.com/blog/section/english/#60

Please ask if you want more details.

Séverin

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Severin excellent information.

Hi severin,

Thanks for detailed info. very helpfull. one question though, what do you mean by "silent blocks". Have you got any photo's of it? I presume you're talking about some type of bracket.

Cheers,

That was Inspiring :-)

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