I’ve made modifications to gear before, but not really made anything from the ground up before.
Last december, I decided to make a backpack for a trip this summer. The pattern I chose was the myogtutorials.com 60L framed (I wanted to be sure there was space for ~9 days of food). I checked out a free pattern of his, and liked the explanations.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the materials. Way too much time honestly, especially with the fabric, but I’ve never been good when faced with multitudes of choices and tradeoffs. I’ve forsaken FC impregnation, which does help cut down the selection some, but there are still way too many fabrics to choose from. In the end I went with Ultragrid because it was woven (supposedly easier to work with and more forgiving of mistakes than pure laminates like Ultra). I’m pretty happy with it, but I’d probably go with a more traditional fabric without UHMWPE in the future, and trade a slight weight penalty for ease of cutting.
I used Ultrastretch for the front pocket, bottom pocket and the aborted shoulderstrap pocket. I’m definitely not doing that again – my domestic absolutely choked on it, and sewing stretch mesh with just a straight stitch is definitely not for me. I should probably have used some foldable elastic for the edges. Apart from working with it, there is just not enough stretch in it for my liking.
Webbing is polyester (I don’t like how nylon straps saturate with water), and buckles are mostly Woojin Z buckles which I really like. The webbing holds well in the buckles while under tension, but slip (as in no hold whatsoever) when not under tension. I didn’t expect that, but it’s quite welcome since I prefer to adjust my backpack every time I put it on. I’d recommend testing webbing with buckles if you’re just getting into it, the differences between different combinations are pretty dramatic.
I ordered a largeformat print of the pattern. In the future I’ll look for a pattern cutting service, because by far the most demotivating part of the whole project for me was cutting the pattern pieces out. My hands are shaky, my patience with precision work razorthin, and there is little if any satisfaction for me in having cut a piece of paper.
Initially I used a relatively new hand-me-down domestic Brother machine, but it wasn’t up to the task. It could probably have been pushed through, but it would have been very frustrating, and I doubt I’d have persevered if it wasn’t fun. So down the rabbithole of sewingmachines I went. In the end I got an old consew 226 (and any illusions of saving money by making my own bag was immediately out the window).
So anyway, I managed to get going, and ended up with the best fitting backpack I’ve ever owned. It is rough around the edges, the rolltop isn’t stiff enough, the shoulderstrap pocket for my waterbottle came out unusably small (so I cut it off), the sidepockets have a clumsy closure etc. – but it works, and it looks pretty damn great to my eyes despite all the wonky details (like one shoulder strap being 1.5cm longer than the other).
I like pockets on the hipbelt, but decided to forgo them to reduce complexity. The belt is removable, so even if I can’t add pockets to the belt, I can make a new one.
The frame was a challenge. The pattern has a single large frame pocket, and suggests using a sheet of corrugated plastic. That was absolutely horrible to me – a hard plastic plate pushing against the spine, and so rigid it felt like the bag was fighting me whenever I did anything but walking straight (much like the last Osprey bag I tried in a store). I experimented a lot with fibeglass rods (cannibalized from an old popup tent), but all my attempts wanted to curl in on themselves. In the end I combined 4 fiberglass rods in a square with a vertical strip of corrugated plastic on each side and EVA foam in the middle. It’s very close to the perfect combination of flexible and supportive.
As is probably obvious, there are loops for a shockcord on the front. The cord I had there (the same that’s on the sides) got caught in a branch and snapped the very first time out. The side cord isn’t exposed in the same way, and hasn’t had any issues, and I’ve not yet missed the front cord enough to do get some stronger shock cord.
Weights:
- The frame is 234g
- The hipbelt is 124g
- The bag is 600g
- For a total of 958g
My target was <1 kg, so I’m more than happy with that.
The bag worked very well for 9 days offtrail in Lapland (one stitch wasn’t locked down properly and got a little loose, but I fixed it with half an hour of handstitching in the field).
Pics, 100g canister for scale (post-trip, it didn’t start out this dirty):
