Review: Helinox - Packable chair Tactical Edition

One of the things I love about doing this, is the contacts I make, and being asked for my opinions on things.

Tay Choon Mong from HorNest included this little number along with a pointy purchase and a slingy purchase I made recently (coming soon ...). I've liked working with Tay, he's reached out to a variety of vendors to import some cool items to his Singapore shop, much easier for me to get a variety of cool things that way.

One of the things that I've seen but not previously had a chance to play with is the Helinox portable chair. Ive had a variety of folding camping chairs over the years. The ones you see discarded at the end of every summer, or midway through. Tube steel and cheep nylon, plastic fittings. I've even had chairs like that break whilst sitting in them. They are disposable technology, and a product of the "weekend BBQ camping" culture.

These days I tend to sit on a log, a rock, or the ground for that very reason.

No longer!

 Before we even get tot the chair, have a look at the case: Made of 1000d Cordura type nylon, it sits at 35cm long by 10cm wide by 12cm high.

It features a 10-loop webbing ladder. which gives you a variety of attachment options. You can see here I have looped the bottom compression straps of my Platatac Bullock Echo pack, but you can also see that I have looped a couple of Grimlock clips through them as well, because I wanted to see how I could sling it differently.  

I found slinging it like this was great.  

On to the chair itself! The struts are all held together with shock-cord, and all break down to less than 35cm to fit in the case. The struts are both light and sturdy, being an aluminium TH72M alloy and the joins are exceptional well fitting. The struts all slot into the heavy-duty dense polycarbonate plastic joint pieces. In fact, combined with the shock cords, the chair practically assembles its own skeleton simply by waving it about. 

It half built itself when I pulled it out of the case. i had to stop and look at it to make sure I was doing it right, it was all happening so fast. Two pieces come together for form each of the back struts, and the single piece four rubber-footed legs slot in the bottom, with a single thicker strut joining the two halves.

When assembled, the chair measures 52cm wide by 50cm deep and is 65cm high. The back of the fabric of the chair even has instructions printed on it. Following the advice listed, after seating three of the struts into the stiff plastic cored pockets, I flipped the chair over, and this greatly assisted in seating the fourth strut. 

All up the 940g (including the case) This will support a 145 kg load. 

And then I had a chair!

 
You can also note that the chair features two side pockets, big enough to fit a cold carbonated beverage and a large illumination device at easy elbow reach.  


The  chair was really, really comfortable, and for all its small size, fit me well, and felt sturdy.

This being the Tactical Edition, it is a flat matte design, you can see that there is not only venting slots in the seat of the chair, but also the solid fabric (rather than the mesh-backed version).  

As I've said, I have used camp chairs in the past that were rickety, flimsy and in the end, disposable.
This is not that kind of chair. Its size, ease of use, weight and portability made it a real winner to my mind.

Itis definitely going in my out-and-about kit, not to mention freeing up space in my camping loads.


 

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You can find the following items I've reviewed there:












check it out and maybe pick your self up a bargain.

Event: ConFest

Over Easter, I took the family to ConFest, a big "hippie" lifestyle and camping festival. We've been a couple of times before, but this was the first time we had gone with the two littlest ... Triceratops Girl and Tactical Baby. This made it quite the adventure, with the two of us adults, a teenaged lady, a 4yo and an almost 2 yo. Camping for four days, a long way from home.

Its not as if ConFest is really roughing it, by any stretch of the imagination. Ive seen any number of campsites there which were not much more than a sleeping bag on a drop sheet, under a tarp, and yet the inhabitants had hot cooked food, from the large market area.

We took our new (but second hand) 9 person Great Outdoors - Silver Grande 9L  tent, as well as a pair of the Spinifex - Deluxe Padded Camp Stretcher beds (XL)   a folding port-a-cot for Tactical Baby and the very ingenuous Spinifex -  Double Bunk bed cots. We didn't want to spend our holiday with cranky, sleep deprived children.

Where am I going with all this? well, we packed all of our gear into my Toyota RAV4 5-door, including the two kid seats, and drove the 7 hours to ConFest, and I used the exercise as a "get the hell out of Dodge" system check. We could load up x-amount of stuff, and only that. We were cheating because we were planning to buy some food at the market, and stopped for lunch on the way. However, it was a good test of what we would need, and what we could do without.

Here's a shot of us crammed in, the backseat full of kids, the front seat full of road snacks and gear.

We took solar chargers for our electronics, lights and the like, the Australian Easter has no shortage of sunlight. The roof-rack was filled with bedding, the beds, a spare tent, camp-tables and chairs, all covered with a tarp. A cheep tarp. Lesson learned, get a better tarp.

We also packed more food than we ate, never a bad thing, and we chose our food carefully so it would not require excessive care or refrigeration. It would have lasted us a week, if we'd been careful. We had packed baby things, including formula, nappies and changes of clothes.

My big box of camping kit, which included cast iron pots and pan, tripods, spits, fire starters, hatchet, lengths of chain, wire and rope, candles as well as cutlery, plates, bowls and the like. A 30L water jug, ensured we had water at the site, without needing to continually trek to the fresh water hoses. Then there was the luggage, we each packed differently, I wore the same Urban Dax pants each day, changed shirts each day and wore my Paleo Barefoots everywhere. The rest of my kit went into my Platatac Light Field pack which also doubled as a Yoda-carry-rig for Tactical Baby as we wandered the festival.

You can see the Fiskars log splitter I chopped three days worth of redgum firewood and the Zombie Tools Deuce I took with me because ... hippies ... zombie hippies ...

What did I take from all of this?

We took too much stuff. The new camp beds, in combination with the huge tent were worth it for the comfort we gained. Even though we could have done without in an emergency, they were a great investment in comfort. We tool a lot of "snivel gear" and probably not enough food and water for a "get out of Dodge" situation.

A giant festival like this is a good indication of what a well meaning "lets bug out of the city" refugee camp might start out like, and harkens to the chapter in Max Brook's "World War Z" dealing with that.  I looked around at the haphazard sites, and the supplies we had all brought, and reaslised that we in the middle of a couple of thousand people who were a weeks hunger away from barbarism.

Sleep tight campers!

Review: CRKT - Eat'N Tool

I really love my pocket tools, and I really love it when they are multifunction. I also love eating, and am really quite fond of proportional violence. I have several pieces of eat-wear in my collection already, the Alpha Set from Sea to Summit being one example, and my Snowgum BattleSpork (same article) being another. So when I felt the need to splurge on a bit of eating tech, I picked some of these up. This is the CRKT Eat'N Tool. I like CRKT, they have elegant and functional tools, like my STIFF KISS camping/car knife and Folding KISS EDC knife

Once again, CKRT have come up with the goods.


The Eat'N Tool is primarily a spork, with a nice dish (although probably not what you'd always want to eat your soup with) and four little tines, very elegantly worked into the tip. Made of
3CR13 steel and available in a bead-blast finish (9100C), or with a food grade black non-stick coating (9100KC) like the once I have here. 

The tool's scalloped sides and center hole give a good comfortable grip, and enough purchase to be used as an improvised mood-adjustment tool (like the Nukotool Skully)

A bottle opener is always a welcome addition! 
 On the back side, three metric wrench reliefs (10 mm, 8 mm, 6 mm) give you some on hand adjustment options of another kind, again aiding to reduce the overall weight down to a mere 43g (1.5 oz). A flathead screw driver adds another on-the-spot fix-it tool to the package, as well as

There is also a lanyard hole, for even more dummy-cording goodness. 




The Eat'N Tool is friendly in the pocket, I haven't gouged myself on it yet, nor did it gouge my hip pocket (proverbially, as I don't carry my wallet back there).


I'm thinking of giving them away to friends for Giftmas...

Click here to go to Think Geek to get one ...

Wish Lust: Kickstarter Cole-Bar

So, I've been hitting Kickstarter pretty hard again (there will be some more re-previews of cool projects coming up), and I struck a deal with the folks behind this bad-assed tool to see if I could drum up some more interest for them.  This is the Cole-Bar multifunction hammer.

CNC milled from a block of steel, the hammer has a serious industrial look to it, but it is a lot more than just a hard looking claw hammer.




It's a claw hammer with a full crow bar built in!

The production model includes a rubberised grip on the hammer side of the shaft.

The straight edges are inch-maked for use as a ruler (although having it in metric too would be a good addition, I'll put that out there)

Using a patented locking gear mechanism, the Cole-Bar can be opened and extended from 0 to 180 degrees and locked into place at 15 degree increments.

As well as making an angled too, this also makes the tool a protractor, and set-square for all you equipped  masons out there

The locking gear is connected by a

standard 1/2" drive which lets you use the Cole-Bar as a socket wrench.

 
Further more, that same 1/2" drive  the Cole-Bar can be separated with a button release turning it into a set of demolition tools.

I'm looking forwards to comparing this to my Stanley FUBAR and Dead-On Superhammer

Claw hammer, full sized crow bar, socket wrench, ruler, set-square and protractor this is a truly multifunction tool, that I am proud to get behind ....  Now to get it over the line, and into my paws to hammer and pry!

Get to backing, hopefully you can get one too...





edit: Brandon just sent me some renders of the finished product, which Kickstarter wouldn't allow ... get a peek here, FIRST!

Review: OpsCore style bump helmet

Here's another item that falls into my laser-tag/MILSIM collection that spills over into my equippedness kit.

I'll get it out there right away, that this is an OPSCORE style knockoff. If the good folks at Ops-Core want to send me the real deal, I'm all for that, but right now, this will do me.

I really wanted to get a helmet that I could mount my Contour GPS cam to directly, as both the sticker and hat-rigged rail methods I've tried haven't been overly comfortable when doing a 20km mud-run or two
but I had a good expereicne with the helmet-cam's at IRL-Shooter: Patient Zero so I wanted to go that route.

What you can see here is the side rails, mimicking the ACH-ARC Kit to which I have fitted a proper Ops-Core Picatinny rail adapter, on top ow which I have mounted my Strikemark Contour Cam adapter. The ACH-ARC Kit and the FAST Helmet rails facilitate all manner of accessory attachment, from lights, to a face-plate armour, goggle straps and headsets.

I have a Manta strobe mounted by a sticky loop-field, because when I am out adventuring, I want to be able to be found if i get washed out to sea, fall in a heap, or whatever.



The front of the helmet has a VAS_Shroud mount where I could fix NVG or the like, if I had that kind of rig. Currently I am sporting a  KayRank Tactical helmet rank plate by Jerald Kubicek.  I wear that rank plate for roleplaying purposes only, I don't hold this rank in any official capacity (and more power to all the real E-7's).

Inside the helmet are a set of adjustable pads, with hook-fields stuck around the inside to allow custom fitting.  The chin and head straps follow the H-nape style  and gave me a pretty secure fit, once I adjusted it to sit on my head, and policed my hair with a HeadSox tube.

Once I had, it was pretty comfortable, I have taken it out kayaking, running on my Sky-Walker kangaroo legs, and lazer-tagging. I will be not only be wearing it for all my adventuring in the future to stave off bumps and knocks, (but as it it only a rigid polypropylene plastic, and not something I'd trust my life and health to.

It is not a substitute for a bike-helmet, or in any way or shape ballistic protection, but will save my noggin from crawling around under pipes and beams. The ends of the bolts that affix the rails and straps poke in the helmet about 1/4" and i think that could do with some grinding down, too, for safety.

Otherwise, a fun addition to my kit a great place to mount my cam, lights and gear, oh, and somebody wake up Hicks.

Review: Condor Combat - Nomex gloves

I've been trolling eBay to find new exciting things to add to my collection, and one such bargain arose in the form of these Condor Combat Nomex & Leather gloves. I tend to destroy or lose gloves, so having another set on hand (huyk huyk) is a very good idea, as Winter is Coming here in Melbourne.

I've covered some rugged gloves in the past, but those are pretty much dedicated work gloves. I have long thin hands, and when it come to outdoors gloves, getting a good fit is difficult sometimes. The span of my hand tends to tear out the thumb/forefinger seam, so having a well put together glove that fits is also something I'm always looking for.

Constructed from the fire-resistant NOMEX fabric with premium goat leather highlights and reinforcement sections, one of the really interesting features is the dual-layer construction. The long sleeve of the inner layer rides up to about the mid forearm, meaning that it will tuck under a jacket, or over a shirt, giving a full "no-exposed-skin" cover. Is is great n the cold and wet, but essential when exposed to fire: be it flash, sustained or whatever. The outer hand-sized layer is stitched tot he inner, and features fully leather lined palms, and a elastic hook-and-loop closing wrist cuff. The knuckles, finger tips and trigger-finger digit knuckle are also leather reinforced.

I used them whilst chopping and hauling a load of firewood, and then later on when tending the bonfire and spitroast I did over the weekend. Not only did the long sleeve give me abrasion protection, and keep both my hands and wrists burn-free, the leather highlights also include a large padded section on the heel of the palm. This perfectly matches with padding needed when using a repetitive percussive tool.....

For me, that is mostly wood chopping with an axe, hammering or sword-work doing scrub clearing. For others, perhaps slinging hot lead.

These are a really nice set of gloves. They seem warm, without being hot, they have good coverage, solid construction and fit really well. I look forwards to waring these for all my outdoors cooking, chopping and strolling.