Zéfal has a new saddle bag for the minimalists among us, paring down to the absolute bare essentials to create a bag that neatly fits between your saddle rails without threat of dangling back and forth while you ride like a set of truck nuts for your bike. Essentially designed for the roadie who fears the ridicule of their weekend group ride for having a low-hanging saddle bag, the $10 Z Micro Pack still does a decent job of taking a few key essentials out of your jersey pocket and ensuring they’re always on your bike in the case of a mechanical. For either road or trail, the tiny bag will fit a multi-tool, a CO2 & inflator, and a patch kit, plus gets an external elastic strap for a pair of tire levers. Zéfal even says it will fit a small road tube if you drop the other contents. Zefal.com
Have a look at what you can stuff inside, plus new commuter bags from Timbuk2, Knomo London, and an update on the Blinkers bike light project, all after the break…
Timbuk2
Timbuk2 has been stitching up their Classic Messenger bag for over 25 years now, and for another season of riding and lugging your gear around town they’ve added a bunch of new looks to the stock line-up, beyond the limited artists’ edition we saw a few weeks back.
From loud new prints like that Pacific Zig Zag above (& some more subtle variations) to all new solid block Unicolor versions that look like they were dipped in paint to come out with all of their straps and buckles in a single hue, the $100 and up classic bag that helped cement the bike messenger bag in pop culture gets an update for improved comfort and fit for a new year. Timbuk2.com
Knomo London
UK bag company Knomo has a new line of commuter backpacks specifically designed to protect your tech. While for the most part the bags aren’t designed to be bike specific, they do offer a level of style, protection, and finish that could make for a good way to get your laptop back and forth to the office by bike. With padded pockets, specially designed for all types of smart devices, the bags even include RFID blocking to guard the digital info you haul around inside.
Two of their top new bags for spring are the Cromwell Roll Top & Harpsden Laptop backpacks that each sell for $100 and offer a varying degree of waterproofness to get your gear safely wherever you are going. KnomoBags.com
Blinkers
You may recall the Blinkers city bike turn signals from Velohub back when they ran a Kickstarter campaign last summer. Well as a bit of an update to anyone who had been following along, they’ve actually turned back to more crowdfunding, this time reaching out on Indiegogo. The way they put it, they’ve finished development but now need a bit more of help to get over the hump into that first production run. It essentially looks like the hardware development was a bit more complex, time intensive and expensive to solve than they thought with their 50,000€ original goal. You can take that for what it is worth, but it does look like they have made good real world progress. So if their design for lighting, signaling, and visibility looks good to you it could be worth having another look. Blinkers.io
