Originally Posted by
staehpj1
Thanks for the clarification. That is about what I thought, but I didn't have the personal experience to verify.
Given the smallish volume I never was too tempted with bags in the main triangle. I don't use a very large frame and like two large bottles in the main triange. So any bag in the triangle wouldn't hold much and would crowd the bottles. Add the fact that the bags tend to be expensive and that I never really was looking for that little bit of extra capacity and there was never a good reason for me to want one.
I can see why they might be a good fit for others who were looking for every bit of possible space without using racks or had some other reason to want to use that space.
I have considered a little tank bag for small items on top of the top tube.
That is pretty much my thinking. The only reason I chose to buy that frame bag was:
(1) I was going to do a week long mountain biking trip, I do not have a mountain bike but my expedition touring bike was designed to work with a 100mm suspension fork so that was the bike I was going to use. And,
(2) The bag on Amazon was less than $20, so if it did not work out well, it was only a small loss. It was not designed for attachment to a headtube, but the way I used it, I needed to add a strap around the headtube.
The bike packers that I have seen in some campgrounds were really pushing the limits for what they could carry on a bike with no racks. For them, even a couple more liter capacity with an expensive bag appeared to be cost effective in their opinions.
I have not used that frame bag in the past five years. But still have it. I usually carry a dry bag on top of the rear rack that has a lot of capacity but can also be shrunk down if less than half full. With that drybag, a frame bag became less useful for regular touring the way I do it. Unlike you, a lot of my tours involve long stretches without reliable food availability so I need to have more volume capacity for food on parts of the trip.