Frankenpannier

Anticipating getting back on the bike tomorrow (after a long weather- and flu-induced lay off), I thought I'd better repair the second pannier, which was starting to split along one of the seams in the base. Fortunately, old-school (15+ year old) Ortlieb PVC bags lend themselves to crude repair with nuts & bolts, or pop rivets, provided you've got a big enough patch of suitable material. Previously I've used heavyweight tarp, scrounged as leftover wing-tag material (an obscure perk of working with people who work with birds of prey); today I used another pannier made out of the right stuff, but with cheap fixings, bought from Lidl a couple of years ago with this in mind. The Ortliebs are also held together with their own nuts and bolts, so it was reasonably straightforward to use those to fix the patch in place over the old pannier, and then tidy up with scissors and rivets. Looks OK; if the rivets fail, I'll replace them with nuts and bolts.

Quiet day otherwise, but with a welcome invitation upstairs for a jolly supper.