Designing a Better Bear Canister

“Doug, taxes are the least of my worries. And anyway, I’m a west coast boy.”

Ha! Californians on the west coast are like Catholics in heaven, they think they’re the only ones there…

There are two other states on the west coast… :-)

“There are two other states on the west coast… :-)”

I beg to differ.  Seeing as how I own 700-feet of sandy beach on the Pacific Ocean.

The mountains in the background are Russia, right?

I think it would be hard to design a better and lighter canister without using some pretty exotic materials, which would drive the price point out of range for many people. Things like beryllium, high tensile carbon fiber laminated over polymer aerogel core perhaps using some of the latest epoxies, the new “super” steel and aluminum alloys (which are hard to find on the regular market), are some examples that come to mind.

What I’m interested in seeing is a much better liner for the Ursack.  It would be pretty easy to make a much more crush resistant liner than the aluminium one they sell.

I’m thinking of getting Ursack Major XL and designing my own liner out of a laminate composite.

I’m not sure if you could get much lighter than a Bearikade (though you might could round the edges some), but there may be some room for improvement in soft sided(or semi soft sided) bear resistant bags.  If you could come up with a more idiot proof closure system you might have a shot at getting SEKI to approve it (if it is IGBC approved of course).  From my understanding the “user error” factor is one of the main reasons the UrSack has never been approved (of course it could be the fact that UrSack sued them too 😛).

Hawaii gets left out again.

Hawaii gets left out again.

….and Canada.

My apologies to those other west coasters! See, we all have blinders of some kind! :-)

Hawaii is on the west coast?  I thought it was an island.

Canada is a state? I thought it was a country.

I got you, Doug. Shake them h8rz off

That still leaves Alaska…just to be a stipul8er…

And Baja!

Wait, with whom am I siding?

not a state🤷🏻‍♂️

——back on topic!

Make the bear can non-barrel shaped. Would that mess with the bear proofness?

Thanks so much for all the comments, feedback, and responses to the survey so far! We really appreciate your input. We also wanted to share a friendly reminder that there are ~24 hours remaining to respond to the survey and qualify for the chance to win an Amazon gift card!

Additionally, we wanted to specifically address a few of the questions and comments above:

@jringeorgia We are a group of 6 students currently attending the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. We come from a mix of professional backgrounds, including engineering, product development, patent and IP law, sales, marketing, strategy, and entrepreneurship. We’re avid hikers and are excited by the possibility of helping to improve yours (and our own) backpacking experience. Thanks for providing feedback on the survey design! We’ve updated the question on the region(s) respondents hike in to allow for more than one region selection. Completely agree with your point on asking you for your perspective on the most important criteria – we included a few free-form questions towards the middle / end of the survey for you to add anything we may have missed (apologies if that wasn’t clear from the survey design).

@ryan Those 3 options are a helpful framework for thinking about the design that we agree with. Thanks!

@jringeorgia @ryan @mjh Point taken about further segmenting the 45+ population :). We tried to edit the multiple choice options for the question about age on the survey but unfortunately got a warning that doing so would invalidate prior responses to that question. We agree with your feedback, though, and apologize to anyone who was offended!

@arcturusbearv3-0 Thanks for the suggestion about improving liners for bear bags!

@here @bcbob @book Good points. We added an option for “Other” + a text field for writing in areas we didn’t list. Thanks for bringing that up!