Not actually the project of the day
Regrettably, this is not the production bag, due two two errors in the instructions; the first error is that my pattern for the sides is 20mm too short, and the second error is that the instructions tell me to install the interfacing before I sew the carcass together. The second error is the more serious one, because my Featherweight jams on the spot if it’s sewing a couple of pieces of packcloth together and it encounters even the slightest edge of the interfacing.
Oh well.
This picture does show a couple of the customisations I’ve done on this particular bag;
- I’ve got a loop on the front to attach a flashlight. The lego guy is the flashlight; his legs can move up to sitting position, so I can use him as both a flashlight for reading the cue sheet and as an emergency headlight if my dynohub explodes on me in such a way that it keeps working as a hub but doesn’t generate electricity anymore.
- The loops on the bottom of the bag are so I can stow my lock there when I’m using the mlcm to go shopping.
The d-rings are part of the instructions; there are another pair on the front of the bag, so you can strap things onto the top of the bag if you need to. (I will use it to carry a set of spare clothes when I ferry down to Wilsonville for the Eden’s Gate R400 this weekend (and, aaiieee! I need to bake a fruitcake tomorrow so I can carry it as rando fud on Saturday) and there are probably other places where it would come in useful.)
The little pocket on the front may not be as useful as I hoped. There’s not much room between it and the Nitto F15 support, so it’s not very good for first aid kits. I’ll probably just put battery boosters and cables into it for this weekend (I neeeeeed a battery booster for the GPS, since it only has about a 12 hour runtime by itself and there’s no way on G-d’s green earth I’ll ever be able to do a 250 mile loop in 12 hours on a bicycle.)
But sewing it by machine makes things faster; if I exclude the marathon jamfests that started happening last night, I’ve done 90% of the sewing in about 20% of the time (the hand-sewing is eating, as I suspected, a terrible amount of time. I should go and buy a lottery ticket so I can get an industrial sewing machine.) and the only substantial hand sewing left is the map case and the lining, and linings are very fast to sew into place.