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

[tylik.livejournal.com]

If I understand what I'm seeing, the rope is just looped back and forth between the two belt ends, yes? Is there anything else involved? It occurs to me that you could make a backing out of a lightweight band of fabric, with some number of tie downs for the rope (I'm thinking figure eightish, except with more loops, tie downs for the individual strands of rope). The advantages here is that while the fabric itself would make a poor belt on it's own because it would not be rigid enough, the rope could lend it rigidity, and the fabric and tie downs could provide some organizing structure, arranging the rope as a flat band of strands rather than a thick roll.

And, if you were careful, you could then remove the rope from the belt without completely disassembling the belt, though as mentioned previously, the belt, sans rope, would be definately sub-par.

You have quite surpassed me in dorkiness, though I find myself wanting to start a conversation of the finer points of such things as fitting points of fitting out a fishing vest with a variety of useful tools and/or survival equipment...