Putting Bike Wheels & Other Gear In/On Your Packraft
This is the third of a series of 3 videos from our How-To Bikeraft Series. In this video, Doom discusses how to put bike wheels and other gear on a packraft. Please email us or ping us on Instagram or Facebook a with additional questions or suggestions for videos. Also follow us on those platforms to see our short Q&As answering your questions.
How to Put a Bike on Your Boat (Part 3) – Wheels & Other Gear – The Bikeraft Guide from Four Corners Guides on Vimeo.
Check Out More The Bikeraft Guide Content…
- “The Pirates of Bikerafting,” a story by Huw Oliver: “The Fickle Fjord,” by Huw Oliver.
- “How to Put a Bike on a Packraft: Wheels, Axles, Chains, etc,” Part 1 of the How-To Bikeraft Video Series.
- “How to Lash a Bike Frame to a Boat,” Part 2 of the How-To Bikeraft Video Series.
- “How to Put Bike Wheels on a Packraft,” Part 3 of the How-To Bikeraft Video Series.
- Check out The Bikeraft Guide for more info.
Video Transcription:
Wheels, I typically do rear wheel first down, making sure it’s not hitting the frame or making sure it’s not going to damage the frame when I place it. Then the front wheel.
I don’t like that configuration… I do this differently every time, so it just depends. All bikes are different, all configurations are different. This is just kind of an average setup. So I like that.
You want to think about the weighting that you’re doing right and left. So imagine your bike, you don’t want most of the weight on one side or the other so you just try to visualize that and then once you strap your stuff down, put it out in the water and just hold the back end and you’ll know right away if it’s weighted to the one side or the other and then you could rebalance things.
All right. I like to use a bungee cord to strap the wheels down just because I feel like it kind of grabs more. If you have more ski straps, that’s fine. But I like one good bungee cord to go through the whole thing. And then if I have some ski straps leftover, I’ll add those in as well. You can get one bungee cord that can kind of do everything, both wheels. And then take a couple of straps and strap the rest of your bike down with whatever you have left.
Okay. Wheels are on and again, depending on your situation, you may have a lot of gear. If you’re just on a day trip, you’re not going to have much at all. So this is probably what it’s just going to look like. It’s you, paddle, PFD and you’re ready to go.
Now if you’re on a multi-day trip and you have a lot of stuff, maybe you’ll have a pack like this size and maybe you have some other gear on here as well.
Generally I take my seat bag off. Anything that dangles off the bike or can get lost. If you’ve got a GPS or a Garmin on there, you want to take all that stuff off. Seat bag, definitely take off and then you have everything in your pack. You can strap extra stuff on top here.
But what I like to do for the sake of ease of paddling and being able to see, when you put your pack right here in the middle it’s really hard to see, you can’t see over them very easily. So I like to just take the air out of my seat and put my pack right where I’m sitting, you just sit on the pack.
Get rid of the rocks. You’re pretty much ready to go. This is the most basic, simple, and I feel like bomber set up that you can have for biking and boating or bike pack rafting, bike rafting, raft biking, pack biking, raft packing, and all the other names you can think of.