Make your own unbreakable shoe laces. That way you don’t need to carry a spare. You can buy Aglets (ie ends – what a great word – from Old French ‘aiguillette’, a small needle) cheaply enough A$3.88 per 100 plus 50 ft 2.3 mm black Kevlar line A$24.92 (pictured) to make your own unbreakable shoe […]
I made this last night out of some aluminium flashing. The aluminium will most likely not stand up to the intense heat of a fire for long, but as a prototype/proof of concept I am happy with it. Some .5mm (soft) stainless steel foil has arrived this morning in the mail so I will be
You will have seen the Jetboil and similar devices supposed to save fuel. I suppose they do but there is something wrong with the whole concept of carrying canister stoves. This ‘device’ saves fuel on an alcohol stove. I have made one for my caldera cone which is an important component of my Cookset but
It costs nothing at all (and only a couple of minutes) to create your own safe wood burning hiking stove which will cook you up a wonderful breakfast (below) in just a few minutes without having to carry any fuel at all (or any other stove) with you into the wilderness. A big saving. You
You can repurpose many humble plumbing fittings into wonderful ultralight hiking tools. Take this cheap 19mm (3/4″) irrigation tee from Bunnings for A$1.54 (June 2020) . I have carried one to sit the sharp end of my hiking pole in so it doesn’t pierce the floor of my tent. An end joiner works well for
I first came up with this idea fifty years ago when I was helping my cousin John Priestley lay out irrigation in his (new) mandarine orchard along the Paterson River NSW. We had run out of poly pipe fittings (a relatively new idea then too) and he was all for sending me (quite a long
This is a really handy piece of gear (18 grams). After you have bought it/them you are going to be throwing out a heap of other things! It measures the voltage and amperage through itself when plugged into a USB outlet and can time and add the total so that you can see how long
You have probably used Silnett and similar products to DIY seal the seams in your tents, tarps etc. You can mix up this mixture which is also good for increasing the waterproofness of your floors too but both these methods are fairly messy. Or you can buy some PU seam sealing tape which just irons
I will not confess I broke the lockdown rule against ‘camping’ and took my Deer Hunter’s Tent up the bush for a trial run. It is always possible at my age to have walked so far (and with this trick knee, back etc) that I could not safely make it back to my vehicle before
(Della) I bought one of these plants several years ago whilst indulging in a little garden-centre impulse buying. Since then I have sporadically noticed 3 or 4 of the fruit deposited at the base of the shrub during autumn and picked them up as a novelty. Today, however, I discovered that the shrub has become
