Bike bag or bike box
I'm going to be travelling abroad with my bike for the first time later this year. The bike is a very expensive Pinarello Prince carbon and I'll have to change planes a couple of times. I want to make sure the bike is well protected and I also don't want to have to take the bike apart too much.
Do I go for a bag or a box. If so which one? many thanks in advance.
Do I go for a bag or a box. If so which one? many thanks in advance.
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I know people who are quite happy taking their bikes in bags - I'm not! I took my brand new £2,000 Bianchi to Spain in a bag about 8 years ago and the baggage handlers managed to dent the frame! I saw them throw the bag out of the aircraft hold onto a pile of suitcases :shock:...HarryB wrote:I'm going to be travelling abroad with my bike for the first time later this year. The bike is a very expensive Pinarello Prince carbon and I'll have to change planes a couple of times. I want to make sure the bike is well protected and I also don't want to have to take the bike apart too much.
Do I go for a bag or a box. If so which one? many thanks in advance.
After that, I bought myself a SciCon box which is built like a tank. That has completely protected my bikes on 6 more return flights. The handlers managed to drop the box on one corner and break the wheel there, but the bike was okay. I repaired the box with a piece of bent aluminium and epoxy resin and it has been okay since.
The weight of the box is about 13 kg which is a bit of a nuisance but at least it makes it harder to throw! I pack a lot of stuff into the box with the bike (tools, carbo powder, cycling clothes and so on) and have to watch the weight limit. I think it is now 35kg and it is easy to get close to that if you overfill the box.
Another thing to note - boxes tend to be bigger than bags. Manchester airport's oversize luggage scanner can take a SciCon box, no problem. Alicante's scanner can't! Every time I fly back from Spain, I have the same problem. The security guy doesn't speak English. I try to indicate that the box won't fit. He tries it anyway. It gets jammed. We manhandle it back out of the machine... It ends up with either (a) A visual inspection of the contents of the box (the quick method) or (b) I have to unpack the box and put everything through the machine separately, then repack it (the slow method!).
If you use a bag, make extra sure that you protect the bike properly inside it. Take a look at the detailed instructions here. They use a box, but the same steps apply for a bag.0 -
Hi there.
Go for a box. This recent thread might be useful:
http://www.bikeradar.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12556836
Cheers, Andy0
