I just made a backpack made out of 1.43 oz/yd2 blue cuben. It is probably a good size for an overnight to 10 day trip if you strap things on the outside. I think I made the compression system well as it compresses very nicely as you can see in the photo. I have one small-ish pocket on the back and a bungee system to put a jacket in that I want to get at quickly. The hip pockets are HUGE, they fit 2 nalgene bottles (used for size, I don't actually use them practically ever) easily in each pocket. I opted not to use a padded hipbelt with the weighs I expect to use with this type of pack. It weighs in at 5.3 oz in the configuration in the pictures. All the drawstring channels are open so that I can replace the cords later if they get stretched out. Everything was heavily re-enforced with the new zpacks cuben fiber tape (cuben on one side, bonding tape exposed on other side) and it worked great. I based the pack lightly on the Mountain Ultralight blog post "Make Your Own Cuben Fiber Backpack" (http://www.mountainultralight.com/2011/09/make-your-own-cuben-fiber-backpack.html) but changed the pattern a lot as well as the size and other things. This was my first backpack.
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img src="/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1330112024_58175.jpg" alt="pack" width="550" height="733">
