Hello my friends. Today I'm going to talk about the incredibly interesting topic of how to pack your bike into a cardboard box. Bikes and boxes, yay! Alright, first off, good news for all of you who are not awesome bike mechanics. I put myself in that category. You don't need a lot of fancy tools. You might need a pedal wrench depending on your pedals, but many pedals nowadays can be taken off with allen wrenches. You also need this to loosen up some other parts of the bike. You'll need some packing tape for sure, maybe some scissors, and you'll definitely need a can of organic re-fried beans. You know, because beans are awesome. Boom! And the most important piece of this puzzle is indeed the bike box. And where do you get a bike box? Well, any local bike shop, no matter where you live, should have some of these cardboard boxes in the back somewhere. And you just need to go in and ask nicely and say, hey, I'm going to be traveling. You have any boxes. And they should just say, boom! Here you go. It's free. Thanks for taking it off our hands. And here's a pro tip. Ask for the biggest box they have. It's much easier to pack your bike in a big box. Since you're traveling, you're probably gonna have a lot of other gear as well, so you can throw all the extra gear into the box. I always ask for mountain bike boxes, fat bike boxes, or even e-bike boxes. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. So today I'm going to be packing my priority 600x for a little trip down in Mexico. And before you get all overwhelmed about this, because I used to, I promise you, you can do this. You're only going to need to take off your pedals, your handlebars, your front wheel, maybe your back wheel depending on the size of the box, and you're going to want to push your seat all the way down. You can do this. Boom, buh buh buh buh. Ooh, this is an artsy shot. Let's start with the handlebars. It's really simple. And depending on the size of your stem bolts, all you need is a little allen wrench. Mines a number four. Just like that, and then the handlebars fall down. Now take your bolts and the cap and put them back on your stem so that when you get to your destination, everything is in one place. All right, what do you say we take off this front wheel? All right, boom. Just like that. After you take off the front wheel, put the axle back into the fork. It'll give it some strength because as we all know, baggage handlers can be a little rough. All right, let's take off the pedals. Some pedals can come off with one of these, a pedal wrench. But not mine. I'm going to use a number eight allen wrench for this job. And it's as easy as just... And it'll just drop to the ground. Here's another pro tip about pedals. I never put them on super tight. Why? Because I've gotten into some serious wrestling matches trying to get pedals off my bike. You don't need to crank on them. Just a little bit of force, and you're good to go. And that will make it a much easier when you get to the end of your destination and you're packing your bike back up. You just go, oh, they're loose. You take them right off. All right, now let's put the seat down. A lot of you might just loosen up the seat collar and take the seat post out entirely. I have a dropper post so I can just hit the button here. Put my seat down. Stay. Ooh, I almost forgot, you know what this is besides being a nice piece of cardboard. It is a front brake block. And what I'm going to do is shove it in between the brake pads on my front brake. And what that will do is prevent the brake pads from getting squeezed into each other and kind of getting locked in place. And that happens if somebody accidentally hits the front brake while there's no wheel on the bike. It's box time. Will it fit? I have a good feeling about it. I'm just going to set that bad boy in there, be a little gentle with the handlebars and let it drop in. Oh my God, it completely fits. This doesn't happen every time. Sometimes things stick out or it's too wide. I'm very happy. This is a good one. This is a good box. Right on. I'm going to put the front tire right here. I also have some extra cardboard right here. And I'm going to slide it along the side because that little axle point on the front wheel can sometimes poke through the box. And so this just gives it a little bit more strength. I will say that you might want to take out some of the air from your tires because if your bike is going by air up high in the sky, there might be some pressure changes that could cause problems. All right. So now with the extra space in the box, I'm going to throw in all of my gear. And this doubles as padding for the bike because who knows what's going to happen. They can get bumped around real good. And if you have this all packed in there tightly, your bike is going to come out on the other end, probably in really good shape. Another reason why you want to do this to fill it all the way up with as much gear as possible is to save money. Flying with a bike can be expensive. And if you can put everything in one box, that means you won't need other bags and baggage fees. Right? Save money. Save your money for the beans. We are so close. All right. So I'm going to save time and I usually just tape the crap out of these boxes. Ta-da! The bike is in the box and I am psyched and ready for adventure. And this is something that's very important and you might think it's silly, but I always give it a few taps, like a little good luck taps, no whammy, no whammy. You can make it buddy, you're going to get there at all one piece. This is definitely an important part of the process. I believe in the superstitious side of life. And when you put a little bit of good judo into something, it usually works, right? And here is my final bit of advice. And this is only something that I recently started to do. And that is, I send my bike ahead of time to the destination. And this, what this does is it prevents me from having to drag a heavy box to an airport and then through an airport. You can use FedEx or even bike flights and just send it right to your destination. Maybe it's a hotel or somebody's house. You go to the airport with just one little carry on bag. It's nice and easy and you show up on the other end at your hotel and there is your bike box ready to be put together and go on an epic adventure. So look into that. Alright, I hope you found this video educational. I hope you find it helpful in some way shape or form. But I really hope that you have some awesome bikepacking adventures planned for yourselves. I love seeing the world on the seat of a bicycle. If you're new to my channel, please check out all my videos. Also like and subscribe and do all that YouTubey stuff that helps us create us out so much. Alright, time to go to the airport. We'll see you later. Thanks for watching my bike box video.