This is a review of the Touratech little plastic reserve fuel tanks, possibly the most utterly useless piece of kit I have ever come across. They came with the second hand small Strom I bought. At the time, I didn’t think too much about them (except of course a small part of me felt “Hmm. They look kinda long distance cool, don’t they?”). Oh how I have grown to hate them with a passion on my first week into my trip across South America. But I digress.
Basically, a reserve fuel tank needs to carry out three main duties:
1. Enable you to put fuel in it easily
2. Enable you to transport said fuel safely
3. Enable you to take fuel out when you need it
With this background, let’s begin our review. Here they are, mounted on their Touratech panniers (these also display elements of utterly idiotic design although not as bad as these reserve bottles, and I digress once again).
As you can see from this picture, they are well and truly mounted onto the panniers, and so 1/3 of the job they need to do is OK. This I’m afraid is the highlight of the review.
We now move on to filling them. It turns out that the idiot who designed this made the opening too small for a petrol station pump to fit in it. Yes. That’s right. A reserve fuel tank you can’t fill from a petrol pump. So what you have to do is scrounge a Coke bottle (see – Coke managed this, and they weren’t even trying Touratech!) which you fill up and then you slowly tip the Coke bottle into the fuel reservoir.
However, before you can get to pour your Coke bottle over the petrol station concourse (and your beloved, idiot-designed Touratech bottle), you need to get the little spouty thing out of the way. This is no mean feat, for it requites pulling it out at EXACTLY the right angle – it’s taken me a 30s of fiddling to get this right every time I’ve tried so far.
Here's a photo of me 25s into trying - I've nearly solved the puzzle!
And finally, having arduously filled your bottle, when it comes to unloading it, you’ll helpfully find that the stupid spouty thing which is so hard to get out of the bottle, doesn’t actually fit. That’s right. The spouty thing actually serves no purpose whatsoever, apart from being in the way when you try to fill your bottle.
Here's a picture of two things which ought to fit, but actually, do not:
Overall, I would give this product 0 starts out of 5. And I would dearly love to meet the man who designed it, to have a frank exchange of views.