There’s many ways to secure your stuff when bike packing. Bungee straps, Voile straps, x-straps, and such and such…
We think the most classic method is using cargo nets. Can you relate to this?

I’ve wrote about the bike culture in Japan a bunch of time in multiple blogs, but here we go again.
In Japan, there are so many mothers that ride around their grocery getter mama bikes. No matter where you go, you will always find them.
We’ve always watched our moms and other mothers in the neighbor hood secure their haul at the local grocery store with these nets. Therefore, we never considered these cargo nets as “something cool”. Better yet, even bike baskets were kinda lame to have on our bikes.

Decades later, baskets have become an essential to the “everyday bikes” we build and ride.
We were heavily inspired by the bikes that Rivendell has built over the years, and they’re super convenient!


(Via https://www.rivbike.com/)

These cargo nets were around the market for a long time, and it’s always the same black, red and blue. We always couldn’t find an interesting color. We’ve always thought if we’re going to make our own cargo nets, we might as well have fun with it.
And this is what Max from our sewing team came up with.

Two-tone cargo nets.

In this day and age, we thought technology can make anything happen. NOPE. We were totally wrong. It appears that there are no machines that knit a net with two colors.
If machines can’t do it, humans have to do it. Max went through a lot asking multiple Japanese craftsmen to make this happen.
After dozens of prototypes, they’re finally here on the shelf of Blue Lug.



These cargo nets are made to fit both 137 and 139 Wald baskets.

We used two different kind of hooks, as you can see in the next pictures.


On one side, there are two carabiner hooks for hooking them up directly on to racks. Nitto, Surly, MASH, Pass And Stow, and etc…



If you look to the other side of the cargo net, you can see that they have plastic hooks. This is for hooking one side to the handlebars when you bought too much groceries or picking up your kids from the local park.

The bungee cords themselves are also made in Japan.
They’re durable, and holds your stuff nice and tight. You also don’t have to worry about them getting loose after a few days of using them. These cargo nets are made so well compared to the cheaper ones that we usually see. Trust me.

Last but not least, I would like to share this mind blowing trick with cargo nets which the great guys at Rivendell has come up with. It’s a trick where you sandwich cameras, computers or other fragile machinery. Now this is what we call a cargo net master!



Oh yeah, you can use these cargo nets on all kinds of baskets! Even on milk crates as well.

Hoping that these new cargo nets will make your life convenient!