Utility Belt

[gfish]

My major fashion affectation is my utility belt. It carries, going counterclockwise from the buckle: flashlight, sharpie marker, leatherman (Charge XTi), digital camera, monocular, PDA/cellphone. The exact contents and packaging have changed over the years, slowly being refined. I've put a great deal of thought into optimizing everything about it, mostly because I'm a big dork.

A couple of weeks ago I realized that I had been ignoring an entire component of the belt, leaving it completely useless -- the belt itself! Duh. So what can a belt do? Well, it's like a rope, but too short to be particularly useful. What if it was longer? What if it was a rope, but folded back and forth several times? I figured I could get at least 5, maybe 6 lengths before it got too thick to be comfortable. So I bought parts and started prototyping. This weekend I made the final version, which has a whooping 8 lengths, each 66 cm long, for a none-too-shabby total of 5.3 meters of 6mm climbing rope. Dorky? Certainly. Useful? ...maybe. Removal would be annoying, so I'd have to really need the rope before I did it. But if I ever do need it, I'll have it. So there.

Comments

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Trouble is, the rope needs to be thick enough to be grasped without cutting into your fingers. There are plenty of fancy articial fibers that could easily carry my weight and be thin enough to get 100+ lengths on the belt, but they'd be far too thin to use. Oh well.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Have you considered webbing or strapping, or some other flat woven option?

Of course, on a sheer utility basis you seem to have weighted the climability of the rope very high, as opposed to any of the myriad other uses one might put rope to...

[gfish.livejournal.com]

(Responding to this and your other comment.)

Well, the original comment that started me thinking was someone wanting to have 50 feet of rope with them as a D&D joke, so climbing was always at the back of my mind. But lots of the other uses require non-finger-cutting as well, so it seemed like the best all-around option.

It is looped back and forth between to D-rings sewn to the cut-off ends of a normal belt. This reduces the usable length, but earlier prototypes had problems snagging on the belt-loops right around the buckle. I decided it was better to just give up on that amount of rope.

Fitting it all into a fabric sheath is an interesting idea. It would be nice to have the ability to remove the rope and not lose all belt functionality. I had some ideas about a single strand of thin nylon to allow that, but I haven't added it yet.

Before I settled on a belt, I had a series of vests serving a similar purpose. I had a lot of trouble finding ones that lasted, but they worked pretty well while they did. That was also before I had money of my own, per se, so I suspect it could be done a lot better.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of the rope tying onto a cloth backing, rather than into a sheath -- a lot easier to get it off that way. It might make sense to have the tie downs be attached to leather strips -- gives it a little more structure and strength. Imagine a band of thin cloth, with a 1 cm or so strip of leather across it every 20 cm or so. To this would be attached a number of tie downs (or a single more elaborate tie down) so that many strands of roep could be attached, flat, in a ros to the surface.

(@)(@)(@)(@)
""""""""""""
^^^^^^^^^^^^

A cross section would be something like the above, where in ^^^^ would be the cloth, """"" the leather strap, and (@) the individual tie downs holding the rope. (I have kind of a specific idea for the tie downs, but I'm not patient enough to come up with a ASCII representation.)

My longest lasting vest was a denim vest to which a number of modifications were made (by me, by hand). I adored that thing... I haven't really tested the lasting power of the fishing vests of many pockets, but they always seemed like a good idea. Of course, my army surplus binocular bag recieved even more modifications, and had an adjustable strap which allowed me to wear it around my waist as well. It really is the direct lineal descendant to my current lumbar/hydration pack that I pretend is a purse. (See? Girls are supposed to carry purses. Any dorkiness is therefore hidden.) I only recently realized that the rope mesh bottle holders that I added to the binoc made it functionally almost identical...

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Aw, drat. I should have used pre tags.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should add some sort of leather gloves to your standard utility belt inventory? It's not like climbing is the only thing they'd be useful for, particularly since you have this odd predilection for combining fire and metal.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

the rope needs to be thick enough to be grasped without cutting into your fingers

no, it doesn't! For ascending, climb up with prusiks; make them from 4mm Spectra/Gemini cord, and then attach small webbing slings to them for your hands to hold. For descending, you would use an old-fashioned munter hitch or carabiner wrap. I have a similar "utility belt" that i made years ago out of seat belt webbing; it has an inside zipper that hides a diaper-seat climbing harness inside. 80 ft of 5-mil cord and a couple of biners fit into one of the outside pouches. I would take this skiing with me just in case i needed to self-evac out of a stuck ski lift. Which, in fact, i did need to do once, at Waterville Valley, when they suddenly had to close the lift down in high winds. I didnt feel like waiting for their evac team to get to me, and used my own stuff.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about something like that, and I might still try it. It's been years since I've done any climbing, though. I'd also like the rope to be useful for things other than climbing.