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

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

*grins* Why use a zipper (nasty things to try to install) when there are perfectly good fasteners like snaps and velcro available?

Hmm ... now I'm getting funky ideas for the thing I've been wanting to make for several years now; something like a cross between a belt pouch and a utility belt, but worn like a small flat messenger bag. Fitting rope into the strap part of that would work, too.

[callibr8]

Agreed, zippers can be nasty to install. However they are in general significantly less bulky than either snaps or velcro, and the design I was describing has the access mechanism positioned on the inside (next to the wearer) rather than the outside.