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The other trash night, I was flipping through the curbside catalog for some, well, off-the-shelf components. In a bin where I'd spotted some tubing in disguise as serious conduit were some -- um. Steel, uh, strap things, 0.1"x1"x8", holes in the ends, ends rounded off. Seemed like they'd come in handy for something, some day.

So, the next day, I was looking for screws to install an extra bottle cage I'd picked up garage-saleing a couple weeks ago, and came upon a stash of hardware leftover from some forgotten bike accessory acquisition. A few nuts and screws and the hex wrench to fit, and some rubber-padded wrap-around- seatstays-size attachment points (maybe these were for the rear rack?). I'm thinking I can attach something around the rack to keep the panniers out of the spokes.

(The panniers are getting floppy with age, and when I accelerate suddenly, like from a stop, or bounce on the rooty bits of the Minuteman Trail, they catch and get bent in the likelier-than-ever-to-get-caught-again direction). (I lost a pint of soy creamer once that way, in a rainstorm. I was mostly content with having gotten caught in the wet, and then this carton explodes... Sticky, ugh.)

There are some screws left after the cage goes on, and it turns out the strap holes are just the size to take that standard bike brazed-on-nuts screw. Anyway, this is keeping the panniers out of the spokes till the innertube lashing (yay, rapid prototyping) gives out. And, good good, the standoffs don't go into the spokes in the chief tube failure modes.