It’s always nerve-racking flying with your bike. Will your bike arrive at the destination in one piece? Is it sufficiently protected? Can you remember what exactly your bicycle insurance covers?
Whatever is running through your head, you’ve likely packed your bike into one of two types of bike box – a soft bag or a hard box. Both designs have their pros and cons.
A soft bag features padding to protect your pride and joy, and is typically lighter to hit airline limits. But that can be at the expense of pure protection, where a hard box trumps a soft bag. On the other hand, hard boxes can be cumbersome to transport.
Enter the Buxumbox, which falls into the latter camp but with some nifty features to make transportation easier and to pack modern machines with integrated cable routing.
Buxumbox is the brainchild of Ed Morris, who concocted the first iteration of the box back in 2014 when he was fed up of trying to find an option he’d trust to carry his bike. I first spotted the box doing the rounds at the Bespoked Handmade Bike Show earlier this year and was intrigued by its claims of simple operation.
We’ve been sent the Ventoux Road for review. It retails for £1,056 and accepts most road bikes and gravel bikes.
Close to indestructible and easy to pack
The Buxumbox Ventoux Road is made in the UK from 100 per cent recyclable 6061 aluminium. According to the brand, it’s designed to last a lifetime with scope to be adapted for future changes in bike design.
The brand says it opted for aluminium for its strength and low weight, with the panels said to be only 0.5mm thick. Buxumbox admits the aluminium will dent or scratch over time, “but only in a good way”.
Either way, I’d far prefer the box to scratch and keep an expensive bike safe than the other way around.
Once the bike is packed, an anti-crush bar slots between the wheels and frame to give the box its rigidity.
If you are unlucky enough for an airline baggage handler to damage a panel, this is something Buxumbox can easily repair and somewhat justifies the initial investment.
Buxumbox also wants to take away the hassle of packing a bike and claims you can pack the Ventoux Road in under five minutes – quite the tall claim.
Perhaps the most enticing sell of this box, though, is you won’t need to take your bike apart if it's integrated.
While carefully removing a conventional stem and finding somewhere to affix the cockpit in the box is already annoying, having to be creative with safely storing small, proprietary integrated cockpit parts takes things up a notch.
Then, having to do it all over again at the end of the holiday adds to the upset.
You’ll need to check that your handlebar can rotate 101 degrees, though, to take advantage of this function – it needs to be turned to enable the fork to slot into its mounting cradle.
Buxumbox Ventoux Road first impressions
I used the Ventoux Road to transport a 3T Extrema Italia to Spain to ride Badlands, a gravel ultra-endurance race.
My previous experiences of using bike boxes have been quite frustrating.
My most recent example is packing my Niner RLT 9 RDO into an old Scicon case for the Seven Serpents.
Not only did I have to remove the wheels, I had to detach the rear derailleur and changer, and take apart the front end, while carefully securing it with plenty of padding to avoid any damage. The experience may also have involved a panicked last-minute dash to a bike shop because the provided rear axle didn’t work with my frame.
As such, I typically prefer to rent a bike abroad to minimise the stress of flying with a bike and prevent any damage.
However, this wasn’t an option for Badlands because the only way I was going to ride 800km with 16,500m elevation in comfort was to use a familiar steed.
True to Buxumbox’s word, it takes only five minutes to load and remove the bike. I didn’t need to remove the seatpost (the joys of running a dropper post), which meant I only had to remove the wheels.
The provided wheel bags, with a cut-out for the anti-crush bar to slot through, are a smart touch, meaning there’s no chance of the wheels contacting your frame when in transit.
Everything about the Buxumbox screams of high quality, with the heavy-duty latches and castor wheels the box rolls on particular highlights. But so it should for the tall £1,056 asking price, which is approaching double the cost of most conventional bike boxes.
The only real flaw I can foresee is it weighs 15kg, almost half the 32kg weight limit of most airlines.
With the 3T weighing a little under 10kg, that’s already 25kg gone, which didn’t leave much room to store my bikepacking bags and other equipment.
Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to putting the Ventoux Road through its paces on my next trips. Stay tuned to find out whether it earns a spot among our list of the best bike boxes and bike bags.
