Overrated Adventure Bike Gear: What You Really Don't Need

Money often costs too much. Welcome to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. In today's episode, I'll be looking at some overrated adventure gear. You've probably seen that ADV bike parked in front of a Starbucks with every Farkle imaginable, while having a fresh, clean layer of wax in a bike that doesn't seem like it's come within a mile of a speck of let alone a dirt trail. I'll look at several items that we seem to be convinced to buy when we get an ADV bike, but in most cases, we don't need it all. So I'm going to start with probably the one that, if we look more broadly at everything that's happening in the world today in terms of marketing fix, it's a lot of this carbon fiber or other weight-saving mods. There's a lot of appeal to having the carbon fiber look, and people will even get it, even if it's not made of real carbon fiber. But the thesis behind it is that it fundamentally is a weight-saving benefit. The thing I'll point out is you have to realize that this is an ADV. It is not a super lightweight MotoGP And if you spent $1, 000 to get that carbon fiber-covered to save one pound on a 600-pound ADV, It's an insane amount of money to spend. And then you get all these little farkle bits that you'll put on of various carbon fiber bits to make it feel lighter. It might be carbon fiber levers or carbon fiber whatever. We're talking about grams that we're talking about saving on each of these individual items. It is not going to make much of a difference in the long run. It doesn't mean that you don't want to have a bike that is lighter, just carbon fiber is, in most cases, not going to make the difference. I'd say the biggest problem to me with a lot of this lightweight gear is you're going to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to save a smidgen of weight. And then you're going to add on a whole bunch of heavy farkles onto your bike anyway, which kind of defeats the whole value that you got with this. All it is is just it's a way for you to spend money without getting real value. All right. This next one is going to feel perhaps a little controversial, but let me go into it anyway. And this is expensive luggage. And in particular, a lot of ADV bikes will offer you that aluminum panniers, and they almost look cliche at this point. You know, companies like Touratech and others produce some good quality gear. It's not that these are bad bags by any shape of the imagination. but these panniers are expensive, and they're very heavy. And you can spend up $2, 000 for a set of these with the mounts. And it's not what you want if you're going to be riding your ADV bike off-road. It's a lot of And that weight is also relatively up high. And if you drop the bike, the bags can easily dent, and the width makes it more likely that you're going to hit something with them. So they're just not ideal. I had them on my old GS. They're really good quality bags, don't get me wrong. I think for the money for an ADV bike, they're not what I would encourage you to do. They look the They definitely do. the distinction I'm making is for people who are buying an ADV bike to actually take it off-road. If you're not taking your ADV bike off-road, if you're just doing it on pavement, just get the regular plastic hard luggage if you want hard luggage to lock your gear away. You don't need these aluminum panniers that are significantly more expensive, significantly heavier. Just get the plastic ones. Now the one I think actually makes much more sense to do if you're going to be taking your ADV bike off-road is soft luggage. It is almost always better. It's often You can move it between bikes much easier. It generally doesn't require you get dedicated mounts, although there are on the market today that kind of use similar mounts to what you would use for those aluminum panniers, but they just happen to be soft And I would say if you're actually going to take your ADV really look at investing in a set of soft luggage. So brands like Mosko Moto or Giant Loop that make these horseshoe design bags that use the passenger pegs and the to mount onto there. So it actually, it's almost like the bottom half of a pillion rider. So their legs are leaning down to the pegs and it keeps that weight really nice and low, which is exactly what you want to have when you're riding And they cost in general about half to even as little as a third the cost of aluminum panniers. I personally have the Giant Great Basin bag and I've used this on my old R1200 GSA for dirt trips. And now it's on my F900GS. In fact, I do not have hard bags for my F900GS. If I'm doing a camping trip where I need a little bit more space stuff that I'm carrying, for camping equipment, for example. Otherwise, I will just use a set of Kriega bags. They have dry bags and they're very easy to to pretty much any bike. I've used them across many different bikes, sport bikes, adventure bikes, etc. thing that I love with soft bags is, in general, there's no need to buy new bags or mounts for a new as I alluded to earlier, there are some soft luggage that uses mounts almost similar to that you would use for hard luggage. But if you're going to have these hard mounts anyway, I'm less of a fan of them. I know that they're out there, and they're certainly more convenient to put on and off of the bike, because it's just a couple quick latches, and you put bag on and off. Whereas the other type of bags that I'm suggesting, you need to adjust straps. You need basically customize how it connects onto the bike. Once you do it a couple times, it's pretty quick, but it's not going to be as quick as the quick release of these other dedicated mounts. But I'm not a big fan of because they just add a lot of extra weight, which defeats a lot of the value of the soft bags. If you actually look at combination of the weight of the the weight of the mounts, you now have the bag has hard mounts mirror up to It's not as good. these expensive luggage variants, that's the thing that I think is a little overrated for ADV bikes. The next thing that I'll say that is a bit of an overrated piece of gear for adventure bikes are ADV-specific variants. And they almost always cost more. Now, for example, I'll pick on actually a brand that I really like their gear in general, but I'll pick on Kriega. Kriega makes some outstanding bags. I mentioned just in the previous segment that I actually have some of their U. S. dry bags that I use those for carrying gear when I'm doing like a smaller trip, typically not for camping. The backpacks that they have are outstanding. But Kriega has a bag that is really aimed at the adventure rider. And this one, the one that I'll pick on a little bit is something called the Trail 18 Adventure Rider. and it's really if you think of it from a size perspective it's quite similar in size to like the r20 or the r16. it's kind of splits the difference between and while those are sort of geared towards people who are maybe riding on normal pavement, this is the off-road or adventure version. But the thing is it's not really any different. There's not a whole lot of extra functionality. Yeah, it has this sort of mesh on the outside where arguably you might be able to put like an extra pair of gloves That's about the only thing. Well, fine, you stick it inside too. Like it's not, it's not as huge of a versus the regular backpack. But here's the biggest thing. The trail 18 is about 50% more than an So you get a bag that's slightly smaller capacity but it's 50% more expensive, I mean there's really, it's this ADV tax that I feel is you're not really getting a huge value out of it in this specific case and that's I think it's a little overrated for getting that gear. Kriega makes, it's not poor quality gear, not by any means, I think it's, you're paying an ADV tax for it rather than it being high value. The next one, and this is, I'm of two minds about it, I think if you start to look at some riders who are out on their bikes and almost that cliche Starbucks rider whose bike is pristine, they've never seen a speck of dust whatsoever. Yet they're in that almost uniform for ADV riders. It's the textile suit. It's got all this venting. It's all set up for all this like really off-road centric riding. And they're really good if you do take your bike off-road, if you're buying it just to look the part like your cos playing in an ADV rider, I don't think that you're getting a huge amount of value for that. They're not cheap suits because they're really designed for taking advantage of the things that you need when you're riding off-road. And it can be quite expensive for what you need. If you buying an ADV bike because you like the ergonomics and you just want to use it on pavement, that's absolutely fine. They're phenomenal bikes for doing so. But you don't necessarily need to get the ADV-specific gear because it is going to be much more expensive than regular riding suit would be, let's say. And that's where I think sometimes people get into the feeling that if I'm on an ADV bike, I need to have these specific outfits or these specific gear. And they're overkill if you're not actually taking the bike off-road. Another good example would be some ADV-specific boots. Well, those boots are really meant to give more support to your ankles in conditions where you're more likely to drop the bike with more frequency than you would do on pavement. And they can protect you for those kind of drops that you're doing much more often. if you're riding on pavement, it doesn't really matter. You don't need that extra protection for that because if you fall on pavement, you're probably falling at higher speed. That's not going to necessarily help you dramatically for this because you're not doing those foot stabs to kind of try to keep the bike up. And then you need to make sure that your ankle doesn't twist further in there. So just be careful of over-investing jackets, pants, etc. that are geared off-road ADV and you don't necessarily need them. And then the last category that I want to talk about is what I'll call expensive farkles. And these oftentimes are bits that you add onto the bike. You're adding weight to the bike in many cases to add more protective capability for the bike. Now, if you do actually take your bike off-road, some of these can add additional levels of protection. But just be careful because you can go through the whole catalog and you can get every little thing. You can get the thing that'll protect the master cylinder. You can get the thing that's going to protect the gear shift lever. You can get the thing that's going to protect, you know, this little tube that comes up on whatever bike you have. Like, there are aluminum bits that will protect everything under the sun. And you have to be a little pragmatic of, like, how often is that going to get hit? And how expensive is it to protect against it? And then how often are you going off-road that warrants it? Again, sometimes I see these Starbucks, typically GS, and I'm a GS rider myself too, so I'm not bashing it because of there, I just, it's almost a cliche, but they're in that pristine but they have every Farkle for protecting their bike up the wazoo, yet they're never gonna take it off-road. So it's, again, it's almost this looking the part, but never actually needing it, and that's, that's again where you get a bit of you're kind of fitting into spending the money that you don't really need for that purpose. I let's think of it, if you're a Starbucks type ADV rider, I mean, what's the hardest terrain you're gonna hit? I'm gonna hit, maybe what, a speed bump in a target parking lot? I mean, that's the extent of it. So you don't need these really expensive skid plates, you don't need these really expensive, know, side protection for your master cylinders. All the stuff that we add onto these bikes are not necessarily required for these. There's generally most motorcycles that are out on the market today, most ADV bikes, will have a skid plate. So that's maybe not the best skid plate, but they'll have a skid plate of some sort, which is adequate for certainly anything that you're gonna be doing, even if you do a light dirt road or something, you don't need to add something on top of that. the next one that I'll say is a bit of overrated gear is auxiliary lighting. Now, brands like Denali, Clearwater, Baja Designs, and others make these extraordinarily bright auxiliary lighting for motorcycles. And often these systems will cost you $1, 000 or more to get these lights because they're very, very high power. And these can light up darkness nearly to daylight conditions. If you are often in rural back roads with no lights at night, they may be worth the investment. I had these on, I had a set of the Clearwaters on my old GSA. And literally, I could be on a totally pitch black road. I turn them on, I turn them on full brightness. I could see a quarter mile down the road as though it was daylight. They are amazing for that. But it's expensive, there's plenty of riders who don't ride at night. Yet they get these really, really expensive things. And one can argue, well, they're good to have as, as marker lights, let's say to give better visibility in traffic. And I agree that that can be a valuable thing, but you don't necessarily need these super high powered lights in order to achieve that. You just need something that's going to visually show it. It doesn't have to be this blinding, massive power light. You're just trying to create that triangle from your main headlight. So you can get a far, far cheaper model that achieves the same thing without spending an extraordinarily expensive amount for lighting that you don't actually use. You can the other thing that you have to be a little careful with is I've seen riders who have the regular headlights that are on the bike already. They have maybe lights that are in the standard position. Let's say BMW has a lot of these AUX lights that come on their adventure models. They may replace those with a very high end, let's say clear water. And then they'll also put that ones right at the bottom of the fork that are right next to the wheel as a second lower level light. We've got all of these layers of lights that are on your bike. Now that's adding more power drain to the bike. That's kind of what you're like. If you think of what your alternator is providing as the bike is riding, you could be draining the battery as you're normally riding by having all of these lights on at a very high current draw. So, this is where having impression of better lighting or whatever you're trying to achieve with without matching it to the capabilities of your bike can actually start to have a negative impact on you. You then will get stuck in the middle of the back woods and you can't start the bike because you've drained the battery so low by having these brights on. So, if you are going to invest in these, please make sure that you do find ones that will work with the alternator that is on your bike. That's not going to overwhelm it Now, the last one, and in some ways this is actually good because I think it's actually now been discontinued. But there are actually winches for ADV and dual sport motorcycles. Warn used to make a model called the XT17 that ran about $600. It was heavy, it needed electric power to pull it. And while it was cool, you might have been better served by a manual block and tackle setup if you were going to go really far into the backwoods where you may need to recover the Now that XT-17 weighed, with all the accessories that it came with, almost 15 pounds. It was about 13.2 pounds. That's a pretty significant additional weight for something that you probably don't need to use with any frequency. And that's why I think if you're going to do it, just get a regular block and tackle setup. it's going to a quarter of the weight, if you need to, it's going to be far easier to pack. Cause it's going to be, I mean, the blocks obviously have a little bit, that's going to take up some hard physical space, but most of the lines and everything can be contorted into fitting in your bags, wherever you need. So I think those are just going to be better for you. So let's wrap up. We talked about some of carbon fiber and other weight saving mods that you might do onto a bike and they're very expensive. And the weight savings is not going to be very significant for your bike, you're not going to make a 600 pound bike be a 200 pound bike by adding carbon fiber. You're going to make a 600 pound bike be a 595 pound bike at best. It's not going to be enough of a real difference for you. The other one we looked at was expensive luggage, especially some of the aluminum panniers and where soft luggage probably is the better bet for off-road. It's going to be cheaper and it's going to be lighter and better for off-road usage. also looked at some ADV specific variants, for example, riding gear, jackets, pants, et cetera, backpacks, these things let you cos play as a ADV rider. But if you're not actually using them for off-road use, it's probably just very expensive to spend on. And then lastly, we looked at some of the expensive farkles that you can get for your bike, including things like skid plates and other protective bits that while they can be a good idea to do, if you are really taking your ADV bike into pretty severe off-road conditions. But if you're a Starbucks rider, the speed bump in Target is not going to require a heavy-duty skid plate. So it's a little expensive and wasted money. We also looked at things like aux lighting, which again, can be really wonderful and can provide a lot of additional lighting capability. But some of them so intense in the lighting that they're going to have negative impact onto your battery. They're going to have negative impact onto your wallet by far because they'll oftentimes cost well over $1, 000. And if you're not riding in really dark conditions all the they're a little overkill. And finally, we looked at things like some of the winches that used to be on the market for motorcycles and thankfully these for the most gone. They've kind of discontinued these because they realized how silly they were. But I do want to point them out because these did exist at one point where they were really trying to say, you need this thing and it's going to be perfect for riding off-road when, yeah, you know the number of times you're going to need a recovery like that. Get a just standard block and tackle and you will be fine. So my question for you this week is what is one piece of gear that you've bought for your bike that you regret? Share your thoughts through the text to show link in the show notes or leave a voicemail at throttle and roast dot com slash voicemail. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.