What started out as a planned day trip around the Halifax area with a friend and his wife on their bike ended with me getting the shaZam! scared out of me in heavy traffic when one of the bungee cords I was using to hold my camera bag on the back of the bike snapped and got sucked into the chain.

I remember feeling a different wind pattern on my back when I was riding down a heavy traffic street tonight less than 5 kms from home. I turned my head to see my Lowepro Microtrekker dSLR bag sliding off my seat to the left of the bike. I reached back and grabbed it just as the straps (which were all tucked underneath of the bag and tied together) were caught by the sprocket. Both of the shoulder straps were pulled out of the bag pretty cleanly which saved the bag but the straps look to have pulled the chainguard around and back into the sprocket somehow.

I don't really remember the back wheel locking up but I immediately hit the kill switch when it happened and pulled to the right of the right lane that I was in. A lady in a van that was behind me pulled up next to me and kindle told me I "left something on the street behind me". I pulled out my jackknife and cut the straps from around the axle and rolled the bike to the next turn off and ran back to puck up what was left of the straps.
The couple I was riding with was ahead of me and didn't even see me pull over but they came back when they noticed I wasn't behind them. I rode the bike in a few loops around the parking lot to make sure everything was functional and we headed for home.

Things could have gone very, very differently. We were on a lot of twisties today with some really hazardous terrain on the sides of the road. Props to Lowepro's bag for not tearing to pieces and sending my trusty old D70s and lenses into traffic.

Moral of the story: f%$k bungee cords.

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indeed. get some rok straps. i was asking about securing camping gear to my bike a while back and people told me avoid bungees for that very reason.

  Glad your okay, bungie cords have too much flex in them for my liking if i ever have to strap something to my bike its normally super small and i wrap a cord around it till it has no more bung right when its clipped on... makes for slightly safer bunging

Something like this happened to my friend today while entering the expressway. He had his cover bungeed to the back of the bike and one little strap from the cover slipped out and wrapped around the back tire and derailed the chain. His rear wheel locked up and he skidded to the right to get out of traffic... amazingly staying upright. He's ok, and once the chain was back on, the bike was ok. His cover was trashed. He is thinking twice about bungees.

Bungee cords - at least, what *I* think of them as - work fine IF you work them fine.



I've strapped different sized and weighted bags to my rack. Camera tripods. Boxes. Nothing fails. I even once had an off many years ago with a bag bungeed to the bike and the bag did NOT come off. And bungee cords as pictured do not just fail without warning. Visually, they look ratsh!t if they will fail. And they don't feel very elastic either.

I didn't see any pics of what *I* call a bungee cord in what you showed. Maybe you are referring to something different than I pictured here 

Michael

And the quality of cheap bungees has really gone off in recent years. Crappy elastics, metal hooks that bend out of shape, lousy plastic covering on the metal parts. Apart from that, they're OK.

They were decent quality bungee cords with a plastic eye hook on the end to go around the small hook on the subframe but one of the knots slipped out of the hook. It was my fault for not checking them more often.

Firstly, Glad your ok.
Secondly:
Buy a bungee net. Ive got one. £5. Used it to hold a full backpack on the rear seat at 70-80mph non-stop on a 100mile trip and it didn't budge an inch. A hell of a lot more secure than using a few bungees, my net has 6 hooks.

Thirdly:
Wen riding with luggage strapped/bungee'd to the rear seat, reach back every now and then - if the luggage feels like its moved pull over and check it properly.

Glad everything was alright. I have the same backpack and wear it when going down the road. I do worry about my tripod that I bungie to the tail though!


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