View Single Post
Old 09-28-09, 04:57 AM
  #5  
avatarworf
Senior Member
 
Join Date: May 2006
Location: The Hague, Netherlands
Posts: 549

Bikes: Two Robin Mather custom built tourers

Mentioned: 0 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 0 Post(s)
Likes: 0
Liked 0 Times in 0 Posts
We have been very happy with our Ortliebs. I wonder if this couple just got a dud run from the factory? Perhaps their panniers are of an older type? I don't know...

What I can say is that ours carried us almost flawlessly through almost 48,000km of touring. They remain waterproof, if a bit faded. There is one hole in one of my back panniers but that was my own fault (I scraped the bike up against a sharp piece of metal). The tire patch I applied to the bag did the trick to fix it and it's still on there.

The few problems we did have:

In Alberta - about 42,000km into our trip - we had to replace some of the plastic clips and buckles on the straps as they'd broken, we think purely through 3 years of daily clipping and unclipping and extreme temperatures. Ortlieb sent us replacement attachments, which Andrew sewed on

Generally - the grippers inside the top frame attachment can indeed come off but we found a bit of duct tape held them in place
avatarworf is offline