When I was at the Burlington Bike Shop between Nappanee and Bremen, I
saw folding wire panniers just like mine except that the bottom panel
is the currently-fashionable perforated sheet metal instead of wires.
This leads me to think that there might be people who can use my
method of making a cooler out of newspaper.

Folding wire panniers were originally designed to fit standard paper
grocery bags. By happy chance, this makes them fit standard
newspapers, so all you need to make one into a cooler are newspapers
and plastic grocery bags.

The description is written for very thin newspapers; if your paper is
thick, you may need to use sections instead of whole papers.

Being a serious cyclist, I always carry a bag of crumpled grocery bags
to use as packing material when I buy something fragile. When I
started doing that, I figured that every now and again the bags would
get in my way and I'd toss them into the nearest trash bin, but it
seems that when my panniers fill up, I use a lot of packing material
-- and if there are bags left over, a bag of bags on top of a piled-up
pannier serves to wedge everything down and protect items from the
pressure of the bungee cords.

--------------- side trip

It is possible to fold a plastic grocery bag so flat that it takes up
almost no space at all.

This is easier done than said; don't let the complicated instructions
scare you.

Take hold of the ends of the seam at the bottom and pull to straighten
it out. Repeat for the seams in the handles. The second step is
harder, because the handles have usually been scrunched.

Put a finger in one handle and a finger of the other hand into the
pleat at the bottom of the bag and pull. The bag will straighten out
and the pleats will re-form. Repeat on the other side.

Stroke from the bottom of the bag toward the opening to drive out the
air, then fold the bag in half lengthwise and stroke again. Fold
again and stroke again.

The average-size bag is narrow enough at this stage. Put the palm of
one hand on the bottom seam and flatten the bag with the other hand,
then fold it in half crosswise. Flatten again, fold again.

When I build a cooler, the first step is to shingle the bottom of the
pannier with bags flattened in this manner. (There are usually
already bags there from the last time, since there is no reason to
remove them when I remove the cooler.)

I put bags under my cooler so that when I wedge all of my crumpled
bags down between things, then buy one more item, I can reach up
between the wires and pull out a bag to tie the extra item to the rack
with. This would be quite impossible if the bottom of the pannier
were fine mesh like the panniers at Burlington, so . . . um . . .
delete this entire section.

--------------- /side trip


To begin the cooler, line a pannier with a plastic grocery bag, to
keep wind from blowing between the newspapers. This is akin to the
"wind shell" that used to be worn over down sweaters.

If none of your bags is large enough, line the pannier with smaller
bags that you have squashed flat, so that you can use them like small,
irregular pieces of sheet plastic. (The squashing needn't be neat;
wrinkles add insulation.) Choose white bags if you have any, to turn
the sun.

Put a bag in each corner, the straightest part even with the top wire
and the middle of the bag pressed into the corner, with the handles of
the bag straggling across the bottom of the pannier. Then arrange
more bags overlapping the first four to fill up the gaps.

Next, take a newspaper folded the way papers are in paper dispensers,
hold the fold against the top wire of one side of the pannier, and use
your other hand to force it to fold into the corner between side and
bottom. Line the other side with another newspaper.

At one time, the next step was to fold a newspaper in half, but papers
are narrower than they used to be, so fold about a third of the paper
to make it just a tiny bit wider than the end of the pannier. Place
it with the new fold in the corner and the old fold even with the top
wire, then force the rest of it to fit. This wedges the side
newspapers into place. Put another newspaper in the other end.

If the insulation isn't thick enough, add another layer of newspaper.
At the ends, line up the thin side of the new layer with the thick
side of the first layer.

If you lined the pannier with a single large bag, fold it down over
the first layer so that the second layer can hold it in place.

At first, I folded a newspaper in half and wedged it down on the floor
to hold the sides in place, then I noticed that the floor was already
at least as thick as the sides and stopped doing that.

Now line the completed cooler with another plastic bag; since the
inside measurements are now smaller, odds are you have one that's big
enough. This helps to keep the newspapers dry, and also allows you to
carry everything you packed into the cooler into the house in one
trip.

After filling the cooler, fold the lining bag over the contents and
put in a newspaper folded in half as a lid. Then use your bag of
crumpled bags to fill up the pannier, and use two bungees to hold it
down. (The space between the newspaper lid and the bag of crumpled
bags is a good place to stash things you want kept out of the sun, but
not chilled.)

To make a bungee lid on a wire pannier, put the ends of the bungees
through the wires from the inside out, one bungee end on each side of
the hinge wires of the pannier end, just below the top wire, so that
the bungee is held by its middle and both ends dangle outside the
pannier. Bring the hooks up over the top wire and hook them to the
other end. Repeat with the other bungee at the other end.

If the bungee is too long, span more than one wire. If you pile up
more stuff than the bungees can stretch over, hook two of the hooks to
each other, so that three strands of bungee make a Z.


--
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.