2026 Packing Concept

(Note: I am an Arkel Dealer. Clicking on links below in the body of this post will get you 10%, off, and gives 718 some $$ as well).

As someone who basically hauls gear on a bike for many 1000's of miles per year, I am always looking at refining my setup.

My setups have meandered over the years, but I do like to find consistency for a year or two so that I can get used to a system.

For a vast majority of 2024, and the entirety of 2025, I ran with the system shown above. Pretty typical rack and pannier setup with a frame bag and handlebar bag, that held about 50 Liters of volume.

Although simple to pack/unpack, and using the best panniers in the world (Arkel Dolphin 32's) I eventually felt that the weight wasn't distributed across the bike well enough. The bike would shimmy/shudder at high speeds and when riding one-handed. This to me was an indication that there was too much weight swaying back and forth on my rear rack.

I needed to move weight to the front of the bike, with the obvious solution being running those Dolphins on a front rack (which I have done in the past). This doesn't solve my issue of weight distribution, however, as it would just move ALL the weight to the front.

A derivative of this idea would be to use a smaller set of panniers for the front and rear, but this means 4 panniers, which to me is too many bags to root through in the dark.

I had used the Arkel Rollpacker system a few years back, and my mind started to come up with a plan. I like having fewer bags, as its fewer places to misplace items.

What this concept does is distribute the weight evenly across the bike. It also forces me to cut down my gear volume from 50 Liters to 44 Liters...an change/challenge that I actually welcome.

My main concern is packing up a wet tent. In my current setup, it's on the rack and cant get things inside the panniers wet. With this new concept, I'll have to figure that out.

I have the bags on order, and there is a slight chance I can get this system set up for the last Micro-Tour of our 2025 season here in less than 2 weeks.

Note: For better or worse, I do not use AI to create my posts. This is all me, with my misspelling, poor grammar and tangential thoughts. I didn't get into this line of work to hand over my thoughts, expertise and experience to AI to spit out blog posts.