jpeaslee
Par Member
Alright Guys I did a mod to my Grip EQ Bag and wanted to share it with you guys. I thought of this idea myself and have been thinking of how to do it for some time now and have finally done it and its a little touch but it works really really well.
So if you have used ur Grip bag in the rain you know about the rainfly. The best way to use it is to snap off of the rainfly on and keep one of the bottom snaps undone so that you can get into your bag really really easy. This worked fine for me I just didn't like it when I was walking with the bag and the rainfly would be flapping in the wind. So to combat this I decided to try and mod the snap to work with a magnet so that it could be taken one and off really really easily. I'm really not good at sewing and I did my best to make it work.
Here is the rainfly part of the bag with the mod.
I completely took the snap off of the rainfly so that the magnet would sit on it better. If you are going to do this yourself make sure you buy a super magnet because the other ones are not strong enough, its what I tried the first time and it didn't work. For the fabric I used a fabric parch kit which has the fabric on one side and the patch stuff on the other side so that when I got done I ironed it and it melted all of the seems together.
Here is the back of the bag that I modded to work with the magnet
What I did here was to take a piece of thick steel and sewed it into the backpack, I found that this actually worked better than another magnet. What I actually did was took a thick steel spoon and just used the head or spoon part of it and placed it over the snap and sewed it in. The roundness of the spoon lets the magnet attach at many angles and works really well. When I am wearing the bag I can't even tell that its there so it works out very well for me.
And here are a few more photos of the rainfly on the bag itself.
That is an awesome idea. I was thinking of attaching a carabiner to the rainfly to fasten it to the backpack strap, but I like your idea much better. I think I'll have to add that to my list of things to do this weekend. Also for anyone looking to do this, Neodynamium (spelling?) magnets at harbor freight are pretty dang strong and pretty cheap.