Plowshares to stones

Broken rivet on the Swiss Ammo box pannier

In yesterday's post, I sang the praises of my new 1964 Swiss Ammunition Box Pannier by Out Your Backdoor. Regrettably, right after posting that post, I rode the bike home from work, encountered a speed bump, aka speed hump, speed jump, speed breaker, speed ramp, kipping cop or judder bar. 


Anyway, one of the rivets holding the rack mount popped out of the right pannier (see photo at right) which then failed catastrophically. OK, that might be a bit dramatic - it just flopped off the rack and hung limply from the bungee cord. No real damage was done other than the broken rivet. I was able to just disentangle my jury rigged retention system, secure the pannier on my Michelin Avenir Plescher style rack and go on my way.
OYB's website says there have never been any returns and that if I send it back they'll fix it and pay postage. I'm far too lazy (and cheap!) for that. I'll just go to the hardware store, buy a properly sized nut, bolt and a couple of washers and fix it myself. The repair will likely not cost more than a buck or two and will yield a better attachment than the elegant but obviously inadequate copper rivets Jeff uses. What is needed is a washer on the inside of the rivet. you can see from the photo that the inner face of the rivet is very small and the copper is very soft. A couple of good jolts on the weight bearing rivet was all it took to squeeze the rivet back through its hole. Lest you think I was carrying bricks, the pannier was not heavily laden at the time. I had an umbrella, a small digital camera and a seersucker shirt in it. Had I been portaging 5.6mm ammo (the current standard for the Swiss military's standard issue SIG SG 550 rifle) the rivets would no doubt have popped without the hitting the judder bar. 

See Part III