Doom On Lashing a Bike Frame to a Packraft
This is the second of a series of 3 videos from our How-To Bikeraft Series. Thanks to all the @thebikeraftguide followers who posed these great questions. Please email us or ping us on social media with additional questions or suggestions for videos. Stay tuned for round #2, to be published next Wednesday. We will be covering how to pack your boat, what to do with your extras and much more.
The Bikeraft Guide: How to Put Your Bike on your Packraft, with Doom: How to Orient Your Bike Frame 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.
- Stay tuned for upcoming stories by Liz Sampey and Jan Zdanski, and check out The Bikeraft Guide for more info.
Video Transcription:
I’ve seen a lot of people put their bikes on their boats like this, with the fork and the derailleur forward. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about that. Mainly if you run into anything, the first thing that’s going to hit is going to be your $250, on this bike, derailleur and you’re going to damage it.
The other problem with running your bike forward, this is a thing on moving water especially, and you run into like a strainer or something or any kind of sticks or roots or weeds or anything on the side of the river, those are all going to catch right here and get stuck.
So a much cleaner way, and this is the way I always do it, is I run seat forward and handlebars forward. It’s way cleaner. Also, something I didn’t mention, if you have a dropper post, it’s nice to make a more compact package by putting your dropper post in the down position. Everything just gets smaller then.
So then… position your bike on the front of the boat. There’s lots of adjustments you can make, but generally I have the chainstays right over the grab loop on the left hand side of the boat. Get that strap nice and tight.
If you start with that one and then just move around, you’re generally going to be in a good position with your bike. You want all your straps to be super snug and tight. And when you stack your wheels on top of your bike, you want to create a good foundation for those wheels to rest on. And so the more you have this strapped down properly, the better your wheels will rest on it.
There’s no one way to do this. There’s no perfect way to do this. And I generally do this slightly different pretty much every single time. Depends on what straps you have. It depends on how much gear you have. Depends on a lot of things.
All right. So, bikes on the boat. Another thing I like to do, because this starts to get heavy in the front and tip the boat down, is I’ll take a rock or a couple rocks and just weight the back of the boat so it doesn’t flip up on me like it’s trying to do. Carefully. River rocks are fine. Just throw a couple of river rocks in there, it just keeps your boat from flipping over. And if the wind is blowing, keeps your boat from blowing away.