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Photo by Marc Gibaud, Clouds on Tres Cerros and Mount Fitzroy, Argentinian Patagonia

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Photo by Marc Gibaud,
Clouds on Tres Cerros and
Mount Fitzroy, Argentinian Patagonia



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Old 8 May 2013
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Bend, Oregon USA
Posts: 121
Security Question: Have you ever had your luggage stolen, slashed or broken into?
We often get questions about the security of Giant Loop soft luggage. Here's a recent email reply I sent to a customer:

Security is a matter of perception. A professional thief will simply take the whole bike, gear and all, and be gone before you know what happened. As my grandfather used to say, "locks keep honest people honest." Even traveling in the US I try to park where I can see my bike - and I take everything off and put it in my room or tent if I'm not going to be around. It takes just a couple of minutes to mount/dismount our bags, which is what I did every night for three weeks in Australia and on every US trip I've ever made, long before starting Giant Loop.

In nearly five years of selling our bags now - and having riders take the most extreme overland trips on every continent - we have never heard of a single customer who has had a bag slashed. And the only theft we've ever heard about was a customer who left his fully loaded bike in the parking lot at a music festival (in Montana), got stumble drunk and found his gear scattered around the parking lot. He picked up most of it and called us about getting a couple of replacement stuff sacks.

Personally, I think the best security is to park your bike in a visible, high traffic location, befriend the locals and ask them to keep an eye on your bike and not to let anyone touch it - or roll the bike into a room or courtyard where the whole thing can be locked up.

One of the simplest, most effective ways to keep people from tampering with your bike is to throw a cover over it. Far easier than wrestling with a Pacsafe metal mesh net.

The Pacsafe should be plenty of protection if you get one that's large enough to fit over the whole bag and lock it to the bike. The holes in the mesh are small enough that a potential thief would have to be pretty determined and have plenty of time without interruption to wrestle your gear through the hole piece by piece.

These customers rode from London to Sydney overland last year on KTM 690s with our Great Basin Saddlebags and Fandango Tank Bags - they never had any issues with theft or security:
Go Light. Go Fast.: Giant Loop Riders: Continental Drift - China to Tibet Photos

At least one customer I know of did a Silk Road tour from Europe across Asia without incident, and without trying too hard I could come up with other examples of riders on every continent but Antarctica.

How cut-proof is our material? Not sure because no one has ever even tried to cut it that we're aware of - but I can tell you our bags have slid across two lanes of pavement and survived (a customer crashed on a Russia trip last year and showed me his Dry Bag - all scuffed up by still in tact).

If you participate in any of the online forums, please feel free to share this information. If there are any Giant Loop customers out there who have had their bags stolen or slashed, I'd like to hear about it!
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