Grafting Aarn Pockets onto WE Pack

[cjhfield]

Executive summary - is it worth it? Yes.

Aarn packs have a number of innovative features and my mod does not create an Aarn pack, just the front loading balance pockets. Making them work with a non-Aarn pack is pretty easy and well worthwhile. The pockets are great for cameras and lenses as well as food and drink.The front loading reduces shoulder and back strain (a lot). I realise I am not the first to do this but I liked the result and others have said they wished Aarn made pockets they could add to their pack. They do.

I was looking for a better way to carry my DSLR with a pack. I had been clipping a dry bag round my neck which sorta worked but looked pretty odd. Aarn make special pockets designed for cameras with extra padding and pockets for lenses but these were not available so I bought a pair of the Sport pockets from the Australian distributor (excellent service). The pockets attach at 3 points - a clip to the upper shoulder strap where the chest strap attaches, an elastic loop laterally to somewhere on the waist harness near your hip and finally a metal strip that goes the full length of the pocket and carries all the weight of the pocket down to the waist belt - there is no shoulder loading. The metal strip slides and clips into small pockets either side of the main buckle. You can buy an Aarn buckle and swap the one on your pack however the Aarn buckle does not have any friction to hold the waist belt tight - there are buckles at the hip to do that. Ultimately I added modified triglide buckles in a similar place - with the pockets full it is easier to adjust waist belt tension at the side and the WE pack setup suits this arrangement. Other solutions are to remove the "wings" from the Aarn buckle and rivet them to your packs original buckle or to use a friction device such as my modified triglide to hold the belt tight. The exact solution might vary between packs . I can post pictures of my solution if anyone is interested. I added heavy duty press studs to hold the metal strips in place similar to Aarn but tighter and added a cable tie to tighten up the waist belt pockets and hold the metal strips more firmly - previoulsly they could slip out when putting the pack on.

As supplied the metal strips can produce pressure above the pubic bone when bending or climbing steeply - they need the bottom end bending about 30 degrees froward which completely fixed the problem for me. I think I have the waist belt a centimetre or so higher than I used to with a very tight waist belt to get near 100% waist loading and unweighted mobile shoulders. My experience is that you should aim to get about a third of the pack weight in the pockets to get the balance effect - they lean forward a little away from the body so have a bit of a lever arm and dont need to be 50%. So you need to load them with dense stuff. Some seem to have problems putting on a pack with balance pockets - I can only imagine these are the folk who grab one shoulder strap and swing the pack violently in a wide arc until it collides with the other shoulder or the bloke standing next to them. If you rest the pack on your knee and slide one arm in there is no drama at all. But when lifting a pack with one hand by its carrying loop the pockets do flop about due to the extra weight. I would always take them off and put them inside the main pack on buses and planes. Fortunately you can take them off in 30 seconds or so.

The pockets are not cheap at around $100 but there is a lot of workmanship in them - lots of hooks and straps and pouches to increase their functionality - they even convert to a pretty good small daypack. They include a custom light drybag. I have walked about 50km with my new setup with around 20kg total pack weight and they are fantastic. If you unload the front pockets and put it in the main pack you suddenly feel what it used to be like. 20kg is a big pack for me but it only feels that way as I put it on and take it off. I suspect that a generation or two ago the average Aussie had a lot more upper body strength working in a more physical job, splitting firewood and using a car a lot less. The packs I remember from the 70's with two leather shoulder straps and a thin strap for a waist belt that carried no load were better suited to that generation. Maybe they were simply more stoic. Whatever the reason it is my experience the more weight I can carry on the waist the better. The more upright the posture the less low back pain. The more free the shoulders the more normal the gait. If I was in the market for a new pack I would buy an Aarn but grafting pockets on your current pack allows you to try out one feature of his packs at moderate cost. As a DSLR solution it is great.

Chris

[DaveGwy]

Sounds very interesting! Can you upload some photos of your rig?

[Maelgwn]

I would be interested to see photos also. Did you system end up so that you could do it without modifying your pack?

[cjhfield]

Here are some pictures to give a better idea of what I did. Pack modification is limited to changing the main buckle on the waist belt.

Pack with Aarn pockets in place

Pack with Aarn pockets.JPG (120.72 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

The shoulder strap attachment is easy - it just hooks under the 25mm webbing used by the chest strap of the pack. It is free to slide so no weight is transferred to the shoulder straps.

Upper shoulder strap clip.JPG (123.34 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

The second attachment is a small elastic loop that I hook over one of the waist belts buckles - its job is to stop the pockets swaying and it does not need to be firmly fixed - I just hook it over a buckle so it is easy to remove.

Elastic loop stabiliser.JPG (72.68 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

OK now the only tricky bit. The pockets if loaded can weigh 6kg or so and all the weight is transferred to the waist belt by the buckle.

Typical Aarn buckle.JPG (72.55 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

Aarn uses a rather small buckle but a 50mm version is available. The bottom of the metal strips from the pockets slip into small pouches either side of the buckle and are held in place by a press stud. I had to add a press stud to mine.

The Aarn buckle does not provide any friction on the belt like a typical pack. Initially I removed the wing parts from the buckle by popping off the 3 black rivets you can see in the picture running vertically. I simply threaded them through the WE buckle and used a pop rivet tool to fasten ( you need to back up both sides of the rivet with small machine washers to increase the surface area and not have them pull through the plastic). The WE buckle always slipped even when it was new but this was worse needing tightening every 15 mins. To solve this you could add a "triglide stopper" (my nomenclature) - my solution to any waist belt or strap that tends to slip:

Modified triglide buckle.JPG (76.65 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

Triglides are built to have 2 thicknesses of webbing running through them but this mod only had one and then a heavy duty cable tie is fed through to increase the friction between the webbing and the central bar - it locks up pretty well - you tighten the problem buckle and then cinch this up against it as a backstop. You could use it on any slipping waist belt.
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Ultimately I used a different method - the WE pack is unusual in that the waist webbing goes through the main buckle at the front then loops back to the hip area and goes through a metal loop - this gives a sort of pulley system with 2:1 purchase to tighten the belt. Because of this it worked better to add 2 of the triglide stoppers here and not have any friction at the main buckle but this is not how most packs are set up. Other solutions might involve a different buckle - an eccentric cam buckle or a 2" fixlock buckle.

HTH

Chris

[cjhfield]

A few pictures of buckle solutions that may be useful for non WE packs.

This is an eccentric cam lock buckle. They seem to grip very securely with no slip at all. You could use one of these with an Aarn buckle as long as you have a few inches of waist belt for its width. On my pack I dont have enough length for it to fit in - my waist band is a bit large for me so I dont use one of these.

Eccentric cam buckle.JPG (72.64 KiB) Viewed 2309 times

Another option is a fixlock buckle. You probably have a small one on your shoulder straps but you can buy a 2" one that works with a waist belt.

2 inch fixlock buckle.JPG (71.08 KiB) Viewed 2309 times

I used a heavy cable tie to attach one of these to the hip belt at my hip:

fixlock with triglide stopper.JPG (86.19 KiB) Viewed 2309 times

This photo shows a 2" Fixlock on a waist belt. It does not slip but you can see a triglide stopper in the photo that can be slid up to prevent any slippage if required.

I am trying to demonstrate that if you replace your main buckle with an Aarn buckle there are a number of ways of adding the friction lock to hold the belt tight. Exactly which one is required depends on how the pack is set up. I had a look at a Kathmandu pack - it would only need an Aarn buckle swapped in and would work fine with no other alterations. I am sure most packs could be adapted with a little thought.

Chris

[north-north-west]

Nice.
I'm looking at getting a couple of bits of webbing made up and connected to the existing buckle on the Osprey, for those trips when I definitely need the extra volume. Also for the Natural Exhilaration (that's a dreadful name) as it's such a comfortable little pack for daywalks but doesn't come set up for the balance pockets.

Then I just need to find a better way of carrying the camera gear on long scrambling trips. The Western Arthurs had some sections that were much slower than they should have been, as you really can't climb with those pockets on. It's a pain in the neck having to remove them every time you need to hug a cliff.