Isn't She Lovely............Papa's Got a Brand New Bag - Part 2
Executive Summary (I'm still trying not to waste your time😎)
1) I'll grind through the design considerations for the bag; then
2) There will be a light touch step-by-step discussion of building the bag; and finally
3) There will be some lessons learned in use, and improvements for Rev.1.
Isn't She Lovely....Papa's Got A Brand New Bag - Part 2
This time, with apologies to Stevie Wonder, of course.
Having established that I need a custom antenna bag, I did what any sane person does when confronted by a similar set of circumstances. Plan A - I tried to find someone else to do the job for free.
I hoped a dinner gift card or a couple of tickets to something might free up the skill set I needed. But there's an old saying about if you hope in one hand, and do something else in the other, see which fills up first.....
On to plan B. DIY is cool. I'll become a Maker, and learn to do it myself.
About three months passed while I watched You Tube videos, bought an inexpensive heavy-duty power tool - I just can not bring myself to admit I bought a sewing machine - and learned in the most rudimentary of ways to use the *&^$%^& thing. We'll skip that part for now.
Making the bag required a place to work, and a place for the power tool. So I built a table for the tool from a neighbor's scrap cabinet door and retasked Ikea table legs, and (mis)appropriated a bedroom corner.
Depending on how you feel about the cost of the sewing machine, I've invested either $30 in materials in the bag, or about $230. That's a pricey bag, but Prada has it beat.
And time? Including all the YouTube videos, painful learning experiences and table building, maybe 50 -75 hours.
This wasn't all for an antenna bag. We need a couple rugged sails for shading the back deck, need to reupholster a very cool clawfoot chair for my den and a few seats in the old Jeep, and I want a grab and go a radio/hiking bag that accommodates a variety of radios and hiking gear in a slick, hassle-free way. See Part 1 about remembering trips that went well and the ones that went otherwise.
I'll summarize the build now. If you already sew, you may want to skip ahead. You might want to skip head anyway.
If you don't sew, this is where you should reconsider my Plan A - find someone that can sew and appreciates dinner or tickets.
I can't imagine you would want to learn to sew just to have the antenna bag of your dreams. I didn't start out that way either, but......
Either way, if you pursue Plan A, this description may help the maker understand what I did, good or bad. And if you decide to try your hand at it, you're going to want to watch some YouTube videos by TheJasonofAllTrades. Jason's a welder, a seamster (the male equivalent of seamstress, apparently) and otherwise multi-talented guy, smart engaging guy, dare a say a true Renaissance man. And he makes great beginning sewing videos.
Let's begin with the end in mind. The design parameters are simple. The bag has to be variable length to hold 24 inch or longer (and shorter) pieces. Its cross-section has to accommodate your widest load out. It must be PALS webbing-compatible to mount to the radio backpack. And the design has to be buildable by whomever will build it.
The finished bag looks like this.
What you are looking at is known as a rolltop bag. If you're an outdoorsy person, you're familiar with the roll top structure of dry bags. Skip ahead.
My bag's finished length is about 28 inches. This easily accommodates the Arrow and SOTABeam mast.
Look closely at the webbing matrix in the center of the bag. The bag has five horizontal rows of one inch-wide PALS webbing, spaced one inch apart. The channels defined by the vertical stitching are 1 and 1/2 inches wide, to accept 1 inch PALS-compatible straps. This standard PALS webbing grid allows the bag to be strap-woven to the surface of any similarly PALS-equipped pack or belt.
The bag is constructed from 500 Denier (D) coyote tan coated Cordura material from the Sailrite Company - very rugged and water resistant. More rugged would be 1000 D material, or even the heaviest stuff - 1600 plus D mil-spec material. My limited experience with bags is that 500 D material is good enough, and I wouldn't use a lighter material than that. This material cost about $25 a yard, which is enough to make 3 or 4 bags. If need be.
The picture above shows any early stage of construction. Look at the cutting board under the material. You can see the bag started as a 12 by 30 inch piece of Cordura, at this point already hemmed at the top and bottom. And you can see the layout of the rows of horizontal PALS webbing as a work-in-progress. Note how the rows on the bag and the rows on the pack alternate. This layout makes it possible to weave a strap back and forth between the bag and the pack to secure the bag to the pack.
A few quick sewing tips for rookies - what else interesting is in this picture? That white-handled tool with the disk on the end is a cutting wheel. You cut straight edges by orienting your fabric on the cutting mat, placing the transparent cutting guide (seen at the top of the pic) where you need to cut, and rolling the cutting wheel along the edge of the cutting guide. I'll never use scissors again.
Note that the cutting mat is "self-healing", meaning it can survive lots of cutting wheel action. Note too that your fingers, while also "self-healing," heal slowly. That cutting wheel is a circular razor. Care is required. Mistakes are messy. Yes, ask me how I know.
As magical as the cutting wheel is the roll of white seam tape. This tape leaves a transparent layer of adhesive that holds your material together while you sew. Our ancestors used pins for this. We've evolved. I don't recommend pins. Again, ask me how I know.
The picture is also a lesson on how things go together. Like any other skill-based making endeavor, you need to appreciate the order of the assembly process. When the sides of the bag are sewed together, it's virtually impossible to add anything to the bag surface, especially here, where the bag is long and skinny, with a narrow top opening.
So here the main workpiece was hemmed first. Then the PALS webbing grid was carefully aligned on the bag surface, and the webbing sewed down. If you wanted a handle on your bag, now would be the time to add it. Not later, see lessons learned at the end of this blog entry.
The picture above shows the next steps. The bag material, with the webbing attached, is folded over with the "right sides" together (sewing speak, I'm told, for the visible sides of the finished product). In other words, you sew the bag sides together, building the bag inside out. You can see there is a double row of straight stiches across the bottom of the bag (at top of pic) and up the side (right side of pic).
At the bottom of the picture you can see the closing strap sewn to the top of ONE SIDE ONLY of the bag. This needs to be done before you sew the sides together. And you need to sew the strap along a little less than one half the perimeter of the top opening. If that's not clear, look at the pic, I'm way too close to a thousand words as it is.
Now you can see the bag turned inside out. This can be frustrating. The bag is long and narrow, and the fabric is stiff. But you'll get it. Eventually.
The last step requires adding the buckle. Any buckle for 1 inch strap will do. Some buckles require sewing to the strap, others can simply be threaded on. A threaded buckle makes it easy to adjust the length of the strap. I'm a big fan of not having to sew on buckles, because machine sewing a double layer of strap can be problematic. A normal home machine may do it if you go very slowly, or better, crank the wheel by hand. But for field use, I'm a big fan of captive hardware. My buckles are sewn on. There is really no need to move the buckle on the strap in use. Better safe than sorry.
This pair of pictures shows the strap as installed on the bag. The first pic is with the strap unbuckled, the second with the belt buckled. Hope this helps.
What you can't see are the straps woven between the PALS webbing on the backpack and the PALS webbing on the antenna bag. There are right and wrong ways to do this, and all sorts of straps or sticks designed to make this connection easy. Take a look at a few MOLLE videos on YouTube, pick the product or solution you like, and go with it. I first used an inexpensive solution - a single long strip of webbing woven up one side of the antenna bag and down the other, with the ends secured with a buckle.
Subsequently I used a couple of snap-fitted straps intended for this purpose. I was tasked to add a few pics of this for folks not familiar with MOLLE/PALS systems. The left pic shows how the PALS webbing is aligned before weaving together with the dark brown strap. The right-hand pic shows the finished weave.
Rabbit hole: A brief aside about the backpack. It's a 5.11 Tactical AMP 10 pack, see below. Total volume about 20 liters, about right for a day hike with radio gear and required essentials. The PALS webbing on the side was added by me.
Returning to our regularly scheduled program, the picture below is of the finished bag installed on a pack. The antenna in the bag is a Buddistick, with some radials and stakes, and an AT-271 whip. The bag is rolled down to about 17 inches total length.
Note also in this pic that the pack's compression straps (the brown-buckled straps) are fastened around the antenna bag. This provides additional stability, and compression of the bag, making the bag effectively smaller and its contents more stable.
Lessons Learned
1) Make sure you've made the bag wide enough. I thought an 11 inch finished circumference was all I needed. It was, but when you are throwing bundles of Buddistick Pro tripod legs in the bag, another inch or two of circumference would make the in and out process much easier.
2) The bag works great in the field. I have about 50 miles of hiking with it, hauling the mast, the Arrow and the Buddistick Pro. I like it. It rarely snags a tree branch and having a separate bag for stowing wet and muddy antennas is great.
But when the relatively heavy SOTABeam mast is carried, you need to pay special attention to weight distribution. Pack accordingly. I've found carrying a quart Nalgene water bottle on the side opposite the antenna bag can help, at least until the bottle is empty. Or you might fasten the bag to the front of the pack, near the centerline, if you have the webbing to do that.
3) I wish I included a handle to hand carry the bag. I also wish I had included connectors for a sling for over-the-shoulder carry. The easiest way to do that would have been to include a webbing loop near each end of the bag, sewn into the seam while sewing up the side of the bag. I hope to include both features in a second bag and will post a pic here.
4) If your pack doesn't have compression straps, it might be worth adding them to this bag, or to your pack. I'll add compression straps to the Rev. 1 and show that here as well.
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