Ecopak EPL/EPX Ultraweave

[Christopher S]

Big news here is that the MLD packs are fully SEAM TAPED!

Now if only they offered a framed pack with that setup……

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

It tends to be more difficult to seam tape a framed pack because you have probably more complicated seams including elements that don’t work for seam taping. For example, a frame is often held in place with webbing but seam tape doesn’t stick to that so you can’t tape that bit and thus would need to find another approach that is seam-tapeable – but that may have other downsides like being less durable. There are workarounds and certainly it can be done, but there’s also reasons why you don’t see it nearly as often. Most seam taped framed packs have some pretty major downsides in other ways, but I’m not saying that’s always the case.

“The white looks beautiful. Just worried it will attract dirt like crazy.”
I think you’ll find the upcoming dark grey they mention looks pretty awesome.

Disclaimer: I own Durston Gear where we design packs amongst other things.

[Matthew / BPL]

Dan, have you seen the grey? Can you make a comparison to grey Hybrid DCF? I wonder how dark or light it is. The white and black both seem like less than ideal colors for backpacking.

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

Yeah but I’ll leave it to MLD to announce more info on it so I don’t steal their thunder.

[Christopher S]

Makes sense since this is only on frameless packs

[Daryl and Daryl]

Delamination of the waterproof layer appears to be a weak link in many of these exotic fabrics.

An alternative might be to use durable uncoated fabric for the bag.  Waterproofness for the items that need it (e.g. sleeping bag, dry clothes, toilet paper, etc. ) could be more easily achieved by using replaceable plastic bags inside the pack bag.  Some things don’t need to be kept dry so they wouldn’t need an internal plastic bag (e.g. stove, pot, water filter, bear spray, tooth brush, knife).

I think Kelty used to offer non-waterproof bags.

[Christopher S]

Thats sort of what Montbell does – they have many backpacks that use a water resistant outer and then come with a matching waterproof dry bag that fits the backpack perfectly and can be replaced if needed. I have a feeling though this delamination is just them working out the kinks – Ive never had any issues ever with X-Pac

[Roger Caffin]

Oh, X-Pac can delaminate with use all right:

But two things should be added in fairness:
* The pack had been very thoroughly used before this happened, in scrub
* This bit of fabric did come from an early batch (from the batch number on the roll), and that DP has since improved the bonding (their statement, I have not verified it).

I would still prefer the fabric withOUT the black diagonal threads. I do not think they have added anything to the quality of any of my packs.

Cheers

[Chris K]

Superior Wilderness Designs just added a grey Ultra100 option for their new Movement pack.

[J-L]

The grey looks really nice. The specs for Ultra 100 seem crazy for the weight. From the SWD website:

Tech specs for Ultra200

Weight: 3.5 oz/yd2 119 gsm
Tear strength: Warp: 103.1 lb Fill: 133.2 lb
Taber Test: 3800 cycles

Tech specs for Ultra100

Weight: 2.92oz per sq yd(about 1/3 the weight of 500d Cordura)
Tear Strength:  Warp: 69.4 lbs. and  Fill: 89.6 lbs. (about double 500d Cordura)
Taber abrasion: 3600 cycles (almost double 500d Cordura)

[Matthew / BPL]

MLD is now making packs using grey Ultra.

https://mountainlaureldesigns.com/product/ecopak-ultra-pack/

Photos and Q/A on their FB page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MountainLaurelDesigns

[Murali C]

stop it…..my bank account cannot handle it:-) This gray seems to have black threads interleaved which the SWD gray didn’t have…beautiful!

[Christopher S]

Seek Outside now officially announced their Ultra packs (no more x-pac)

Unfortunately they are still binding the interior seams with webbing which is fairly oldschool and outdated. Most other pack manufacturers have told me that they think binding with webbing on the inside is specifically NOT the way to go with laminate materials. They are instead all doing a flatlock + extra stitches and bartacks as needed. This makes it very easy for the end user to tape or seal with liquid sealant as needed. MLD and SWD both confirmed this.

I may try to convince SO to make me a pack with no webbing on the seams and if they agree then a very nice x-pac Divide may be coming up for sale  :-)

[Murali C]

It would have been nice to have a completely gray backpack from MLD instead of the black back…..as the white sweaty crud is more visible on the black. I am still divided if that is good or bad….as I guess having black means you can see it and hence clean it as salt is pretty corrosive. Or should it just be hidden with lighter color fabrics so as to not show. I think one should still periodically clean that crap else the material can become crusty and corrode….

[YoPrawn]

Are these pack makers actually doing serious testing of these fabrics in real-world use before selling them as products? It seems there is a trend in this industry to want to jump on new bandwagons that end up rolling into dead ends.

Zpacks also now has ULTRA 100 and 200 Arc Haul packs. They also fully seam tape their packs and I would also guess they do at least some amount of real-world testing on their products, as they probably have more hikers miles per year on their gear than any other “cottage” company doing high-end gear.

I personally think good old DCF already used by Zpacks is my favorite as it is so dang easy to repair with a piece of tape, getting holes is an absolute non-issue for me. I’ve used some super-clapped-out multi-thousand mile Zpacks backpacks and know where they tend to wear out the fastest and can reinforce those areas as needed around the hip belt and belt pockets.

[Murali C]

We will know more end of this season as AT/PCT/CDT hikers put it through the grinder….there is no testing like mass testing by hikers in the real world! Nothing can replicate that!

Also with DCF getting harder to get and Ecopak/Ultra easier to get and Taber tests indicating it is superior to DCF, it is a easy decision for pack manufacturers to switch to Ecopak/Ultra.

Zpacks backpacks are getting more and more expensive…399 for Ultra seems crazy. Then add another 50 bucks or so for hip belt pockets – so 450 for ultra and 425 for 2.92 osy DCF. HMG backpacks seems like a bargain…you can get HMG backpacks for a 20% discount most of the time with hip belt pockets – the 5 osy black 3400 will cost only (:-) 300 bucks with hip belt pockets.

 

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

“Unfortunately they are still binding the interior seams with webbing which is fairly oldschool and outdated. Most other pack manufacturers have told me that they think binding with webbing on the inside is specifically NOT the way to go with laminate materials. They are instead all doing a flatlock + extra stitches and bartacks as needed. This makes it very easy for the end user to tape or seal with liquid sealant as needed. MLD and SWD both confirmed this.”

It’s not as simple as binding = outdated and flat seams = better, for a few reasons:

1) These are not two competing options. You can do bound seams, flat seams, or both. Whether or not a seam is flat doesn’t determine whether or not it is bound. Binding is just a way of finishing the edge and can be applied to a flat seam or non-flat seams.

2) Flat seams are better than a single stitched seam, but not necessarily better than some other ways of sewing seams (that might also be bound). Flat seams are often a good choice, but there are many situations where they are worse or don’t work at all. With a simple pack (e.g. frameless, no load lifters, minimal padding) like you see from MLD you can flat sew pretty much everything – which is great, so of course they do that. But as you get into more complex packs with more sophisticated frames, load lifters and harnesses like you see from Seek Outside there are numerous situations where using flat seams doesn’t work or leaves a weaker seam. For example, you may not be able to lay a seam flat if it has very thick padding or webbing in it. As another example, you can have situations where adding that second ‘top stitch’ to lay the seam flat would leave the top stitching exposed on an abrasion prone surface (e.g. a back panel) where it is prone to breaking over time. Here, it would be better to double stitch the seam in some other way without the surface stitching that a flat seam requires. Any flat seam will leave stitches on the surface that are more prone to breaking during abrasion than if you had internal double stitching, so it’s not necessarily a good idea in exposed parts of the pack.

Certainly there are many situations where single stitching + binding tape is not the best seam so you do want to be wary of that, but I wouldn’t immediately jump to a negative view of the pack if you simple see binding – it might just be to give it a professional look inside. Historically single stitching + binding was widely used because packs were super beefy anyways, whereas as you get into lighter materials it becomes more important that something better is used but still it depends on the specifics of the seam. If you have a critical seam with a light fabric then often the best option will be a flat seam but not always – particularly not with more complex packs. That a big part of the reason why you see it on simpler packs like MLDs, but don’t on more complex packs like Zpacks’ Arc packs and Seek Outside. Even SWD packs are not 100% flat seams.

Then binding is a separate topic but with a similar conclusion. The idea of laying everything flat and seam taping it sounds great, but again it doesn’t work as you get into more complex packs. I’ve given some examples above, and then another good example is pad sleeves. With a pad sleeve it becomes very difficult to seam tape so it actually works 100%. Maybe you tape inside the pad sleeve, but water leaks into the sleeve and then seeps inside via another seam or gets trapped in the pad sleeve. Even if you can, maybe it’s better just to use a lighter/non-seam tapable fabric for the interior side of the pad sleeve since it can be a fair bit lighter and the idea of a truly waterproof pack fades as the pack becomes more complex/load capable.

So for a simple pack, yeah lay it all flat and seam tape it. Whereas for pack with a more robust harness, pad sleeve, load lifters etc, then the best option might be a mostly flat seams but some other styles as well and with no real chance of making it 100% waterproof so it can be better just to bind the seams for a nice finished look instead of trying to seam tape in an application where it’s not going to work out well.

One last note is that there is a common view that with laminates you should seam tape to reduce delamination. This view seems to have arisen from a very small sample size of instances of delamination that occurred on the more coarse Ultra 400 or 800 which delams more easily than the Ultra 100/200. There is a correlation between seam tape and reducing delam, but correlation is not causation. The main thing that is actually helping is the flat seam – not the tape – because the flat seam spreads the strain across the length of where the material is folding instead of on the individual stitch points.

In summary, Ultra 100/200 are better are avoiding delam than the Ultra 400/800. Flat seams are nice to see on the major seams but aren’t always possible and aren’t necessary (e.g. low strain seams), and if a pack is simple then they try to lay it all flat and seam tape but with more complex packs it’s not really going to work so binding can be the pragmatic option.

[Roger Caffin]

I will add some historical perspective to all this.

Way back in time, before some of you were born (laying it on with a trowel you see), packs were made out of canvas. Yeah, real cotton canvas. Later on the canvas included some synthetic fibres for extra strength, but it was still cotton canvas. Now with cotton canvas with NO modern coating at all, the edges of the fabric could and did fray.

So, the edges were bound to prevent abrasion and fraying. That is (I think) where it started.

Cheers

[Christopher S]

Lot of good info there Dan – that helps a lot. In the case of the Seek Outside though specifically they are basically using an external frame design and the pack bag mainly attaches to the frame with some external webbing loops ( I believe – will have to look at my pack again ). Basically there is no pad sleeve or frame sleeve and the packbags can fairly easily be transferred on and off the frame if you want to change sizes (all of the packs use the same frame). They even have a line of “breakway” pack bags that attach via long straps to the frame so that you can extend the pack bag away from the frame and directly compress large and heavy stuff onto the frame itself. So for a more complicated frame / bag design like SWD uses I totally get why there are non tapeable seams but specifically for the Seek Outside it “seams” unnecessary. Then again they could have done their own internal testing as they are marketing the bags also to hunters and claim the frame can hold 200 to 300 hundred pounds so maybe at crazy higher weights there are advantages to still binding with webbing? I still need to call them and see if I can convince them to make me a bag without bound seams and ask also what types of stitches they are using throughout and below the binding.

 

Roger – for awhile I actually tested out a very old vintage Swedish military pack that used cotton canvas for the bag. It also had a welded metal external frame (surprisingly light for how old it was). I suspect steel but it could have even been aluminum. I believe it was WWII era. The harness left a lot to be desired comfort wise (all leather with no padding) but with some added foam it actually might have been decently comfortable.

 

I still think that the Dimension Polyant X-Cotton Duck is a super underrated fabric – its a laminate just like X-Pac so super waterproof but also has an actually cotton canvas exterior fabric (and no xthreads from what I remember) which gives it a cool vintage look. Performance wise I am sure it is technically worse but cotton canvas can actually be a pretty overall durable material and I was surprised more pack makers did not offer it as an option. A more casual waterproof camera bag would be great in this stuff.

[Chris L]

@Christopher S – What you’re saying about Seek Outside packs totally depends on whether it’s their “integrated” or “breakaway” model. Their breakaway designs seem like they could be taped fairly easily since it’s mostly a bag that attaches to a separate frame panel that contains all the suspension components.

Being an owner of a Seek Outside “integrated” pack, and having made a number of pack bags for the frame using a similar design, I can confidently say that due to the complexity of the frame interface it would be very difficult (impossible?) to tape the vertical side panel/user panel seam with their current design. It would need to be significantly re-engineered to provide the flat seams you would need in order to tape. I’ve tried this with my own designs and ultimately decided it’s not really worth the extra effort. I’d love to see a simple MYOG integrated bag for a SO frame that allows easy seam taping!

Last summer I made an Ultra 400 packbag for the SO frame that mimics their design. I straight-stitched and bound the main seams – similar to how they do it. I took it on a month-long, rugged backpack trip and while I noticed a couple small stress points where there was some minor stitch elongation, I did not see any delamination or major issues. But that was only 30 days of use, so still early on in a pack’s theoretical lifecycle. I’ve since sold it to fund other MYOG projects.

I keep getting tempted to make another Ultra pack, but I’m going to wait and see how this shakes out. I’ve made a pack from Ecopak EPLX400 – which is a tapable, burlyish 400D fabric – and I really like it. This is what the new non-Ultra SO packs are using. The weight difference for a medium to large pack is only 3-4 oz by my calculations (and SO says about 4 oz). The EPLX400 will likely be burly enough for most users and is unlikely to have any delamination concerns and it’s similar to tried and true X-Pac.

[Christopher S]

I was looking at their breakaway version now that I think about it – my mistake. Too bad those add so much weight (seems like most of it must be in that added back panel that must be attached to the frame directly) because I would imagine those bags would have way less seams in the first place.

Did you ever experiment making your own version of the breakaway design? I wonder if some weight could be shaved off their back panel if someone wasnt planning to be compressing hunter sized loads between the bag and frame……

Theoretically I suppose one could make a pack bag that was sort of a hybrid design too – add the frame panel to the frame and then have a breakaway style pack that instead just directly looped onto the frame? I could be over thinking this. The other advantage I saw of Ultra is that the face fabric itself would absorb less water – xpac does gain some weight once its fully saturated.

The seams I am most concerned about water entering is actually the exterior ones anyways (not the ones against the back panel I mean). The back panel usually gets less water anyways overall and I would be less opposed to externally sealing it somehow since its mostly covered and wouldnt be so ugly.

[Philip Tschersich]

ULA briefly made versions of the Catalyst where the seam binding was on the outside of the pack, like with the Rogue Panda Zoro. This allowed full seam taping of the interior. It can be done even with straps, pockets, and frame/suspension components.

[Chris L]

That’s a good point Philip. I’ve considered external seam binding, but it seems like an odd look. Maybe it would just take some getting used to.

[Christopher S]

Could just do external seam binding only on the back panel – leave the other seams flat stitched only?

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

Yes you could do that but it still leaves the pack slightly below the threshold of being fully waterproof, so it is an improvement but practically it may not have a benefit if you still need to protect your stuff in some other way like a pack liner or waterproof stuff sacks.

I find that non-seam taped but waterproof fabrics will keep out 95-98% of the water and then a few stuff sacks that I carry anyways provide a good solution to that tiny bit that gets in during all day rain (e.g silnylon quilt sack, clothes sack etc). If some seams were taped it would be slightly better but I’d still need the same system. Even if it’s 100% waterproof, I still like this system to stay organized so pursuing that last few % of waterproofness hasn’t been a high priority for me.

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