A place for me to review the various rugged, nifty and needful kit that I've accumulated, for every-day preparedness in the event of accident, disaster or world-shifting end-times Apocalypse, be it zombies, triffids or Mayan divide-by-zero errors.
I lucked out with a eBay lot and snagged some new summer-weight boots, just in time for the scorching weather we've been having. I wear boots all day, every day, apart from when I am in my Barefoots, or in fact barefoot. I've been wearing the rather comfortable Danner Striker II's but I wore them out, the sides wore through, in this case, rather than the way both my Bates Delta-8 and Altama Desert boots dies, with splits in the soles. FOr heavy work, I fall back to my HyTest armored boots.
These 8" boots are fitted out with a suede / 1150 Denier ballistic nylon upper, with a friction and slip resistant outsole, it is even stamped Oil and Slip resistant. The outsole has a steel shank, which adds to the support of the boot (though it did set off the metal detectors at the airport at my last visit).
The tread is quite interesting, in what appears to be a proprietary Magnum pattern, unlike the Panama or Vibram styles I have been used to. They have given me no trouble, and give quite an even walking and running surface. I also like that they include a Flex Groove to avoid the split that killed my Altamas and Bates boots.
The boots are lined with a Dri-Lex® two zone comfort lining with Hydrofil® for breathability, and the FPS footbed with dual shock pads and antibacterial lining. Months of wearing these boots now, and they don't smell too bad, thus far.
The padded, broadly gusseted tongue not only keeps the laces from pinching and rubbing the foreleg (important for those of us with skinny legs), but it also acts to keep out debris, which has done so nicely.
I also really liked the built in boot-strap, which was offset from the mouth of the boot, meaning that I can feed my laces through them, without it riding up over my ankle.
As well as the boot-strap, they also feature 4 sets of eyelets, a set of speed hooks and then four sets of speed loops. This makes putting the boots on, and with a quick pull, the laces simply zip up tight and you are good to go.
I've given them a coat of spray on suede protector, which has kept some of the grot of my day to day life off them, but one thing I can say is that these are some comfortable boots. I look forwards to many seasons of wear out of them, but, we'll see. I seem to kill boots on a regular basis. I'd love to hear about what boots YOU get a lot of wear out of or can recommend ...
I received an email from the creators of this tool who have an ongoing Kickstarter project, who thought that you (awesome, Equipped reader) and I might be interested in.
I've covered several card-tools in past, including the Card-Sharp 2 knife (don't forget to take it out of your wallet at airports). I have a carbon fiber card tool already, the Kumquat but its only real "tool" is a bottle opener. Cute, but not overly functional.
This tool, however, has a lot more going for it, and I was only too happy to share it with you, to add an EDC option we can all carry. This is the CiFer "Unbreakable" card tool.
Constructed of a top layer of 2/2 Twill wave 200gr/sqm carbon fibre which is 0.27mm thick followed by 3 layers of 2/2 Twill wave 650gr/sqm carbon with a thickness of 0.6mm. This gives a final thickness of 2.07mm and the best possible strength.
The thin (0.27mm) carbon fiber fabric gives you the perfect looking finish and the addition layer of thin carbon provides a lot of reinforcing support. There WILL NOT be any kind of fiberglass, eGlass, performanceGlass backing layer.
Thanks to the extremely durable yet ultra light material - carbon fiber,
CiFer only weights as much as two credit cards (11-12 g).
The CiFer is a iPhone holder, cable management card (headphones can wrap in the side notches and the earbuds feed through the bottle opener), a bottle opener, a 7mm, 8mm, 10mm and 13mm wrench (along with a second 8mm one in the corner as a keychain hole and an etched ruler.
The phone holder will accept many flat-sided phones and tablets, but will not work with the iPhone 3 series.
The folks from Beyond Vision also gave the CiFer the "will it blend" test, and whilst the carbon fiber took some dings, in the end, it was too much for the blender body, shattering the vessel.
This is a pretty cool do-dad that I'd be happy to put in my wallet, especially as it could be carried through metal detectors. I do hope this tool makes it through funding, check it out.
I ran into some fun folks when visiting OzComicCon, who made and sold custom dog-tags. When I wast told they had a Kickstarter going locally to me, to take their product to the next level. I got in touch with Sgt. Slaughter from Zombie Dog Tags.com to talk about their products, vision and their Kickstarter Project.It finishes .
So, in a departure from my usual style, here's the interview...
Q: What is a Zombie Dog Tag? A: Zombie Dog Tags are your way to show your support for humanity in a post-apocalyptic world. Zombie Dog Tags come in a range of styles and designs from engraved Zombie hunting permits, to the fully personalised MILSPEC embossed dog tags. Our hand anodised aluminium, USA made tags are engraved in Melbourne Australia and offer a smorgasbord of colours, images and text so you can dish out zombie carnage in style. Our super tough battle proven military grade dog tags are USA made, and embossed in Melbourne Australia on the same military equipment that has already seen action in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are built to last and will ensure you will be ready to defend the world when the invertible happens.
Q: What made you think to design and make your own dogtags? A: We were involved in a Zombie related website that photographed models in their apocalypse gear with knives and swords. Each model had their own unique serial numbered dog tags which they got to keep after the shoot. The dog tags proved so popular we ended up having to buy more and more. We were paying a fortune for crappy quality embossed dog tags and we had no flexibility when we wanted to change them as everything had to be ordered a month in advance. So we decided to buy our own US Military Dog tag embossing machine. After the massive crate arrived with our new pride and joy, we sat around talking about how great it would be if we could put images on our tags and create other Zombie related dog tags. After a bit of investigation, our options were cheap crappy production in china or invest in our own equipment and make high quality ones ourselves. We talked to friends and family and everybody said we were crazy as no one would want a Zombie Dog Tag so that was good enough for us, we love a challenge so we purchased a machine and here we are. Of course it was an overnight success and these days we have primetime shows like the Walking Dead and Hollywood movies with Brad Pitt fighting Zombies so of course everyone gets it now!
Q: How did zombies in popular culture influence your designs? A: I’d say our biggest influence is when we’re sitting around watching Zombie movies and one of our team says ‘That person needs a tag that says …’. We love the classic symbols used like the biohazard sign, but we’re also trying to create our own, for example the crossbow in the Daryl Dixon quote tag we make ‘I ain’t nobody’s bitch’.
Q: What about other apocalyptic disaster situations? A: Not so much currently, we’re fixated with Zombies right now, but we do have future plans to expand into different genres.
Q: What uses do you foresee your dogtags playing in survival situations?
A: I’d say the most important tag would have to be our bottle opener tag, just because the world has been overrun by Zombies, doesn’t mean we should stop drinking beer! But we do also have a more serious side to our tags. We’ve created tags with parental contact information for children with disabilities, tags with vital medical information and tags for sports people with next of kin information (who takes ID with them when they do things like jogging at 5am in the morning!). ICE (In Case of Emergency) doesn’t need to be boring, and we’ve found people are much more willing to wear a tag like ours rather than a generic ICE tag.
We’ve also supplied members of the US Military with embossed tags which i’d say was our biggest challenge as we had to setup our machine to perfectly match tags from photographs, which was completely different than the usual army tags and in a layout we’ve never seen before. The end result came out perfectly and was approved for use, we created MILSPEC and Special Ops Black tags so who knows where these tags are right now or why this different layout was approved. Maybe we have a bunch of top secret Zombie killing super soldiers running around wearing our gear!
Q: What are your KickStarter design options, and what do they represent? A: Via Kickstarter we’re introducing a whole new concept, the personalised Zombie Hunting Permit, each tag has a personalised name and a unique serial number. This has never been seen before! We have 7 different tags suitable for Zombie haters, Zombie Lovers and we even have ‘INFECTED’ tags for Zombies! We’re also giving away FREE embossed tags with some pledges. We’re currently running a vote so the Kickstarter community can decide what goes on these bonus tags.
Q: What conditions do you expect your dogtags will survive? A: We have the 2 types of tags, embossed and engraved. Embossed tags are battle proven and the same as used by the US military and are created by punching the letters through the steel so they are raised, just like the plastic letters on a credit card so you can’t get much tougher than that! The engraved tags is diamond drag so we actually remove metal from the tag rather than just burning the coating like laser engraving. We even engrave the tag twice to get the perfect deeper shine. I’d say both types of tags will outlast all of us in most situations!
Q: What materials do you use, and why? A: We use the best materials we can source. This does come at a huge cost to us but we feel its the only way we can stand behind our product. The embossed tag blanks are USA made and our supplier also supplies them to the US military.
The Aluminium engraved tag blanks are also USA made & hand anodised in the US too. The chains we use on all the tags are also USA made. Both types of tags are embossed or engraved by us in Melbourne Australia. We have many options for cheaper materials and faster production, but that's not what we want, we don’t want to be the biggest seller of tags in the world, we just want to be the best!
Q: How did you get started in finding the equipment you needed? A: A lot of phone calls! This isn’t standard equipment you can buy locally. After months of research we ended up managing to get the last military embosser available at that time from the USA.
It was a big struggle for us as we could of easily purchased a ‘commercial embosser’ that would of produced a similar result and been much cheaper and faster, but we wanted the same as the US military use but you don’t just walk into a shop and buy that type of machinery. We ended up getting hold of the same machine that has seen action with the USA military in some of the worst hotspots on earth, if works for them, then its good enough for us. The engraver was easier and we imported that from France.
Q: What resources would you need to keep going, if SHTF? A: Our embosser is classed as portable as the US military would obviously move it around a lot. It has a hard steel outer shell and a handle plus a few pins you can put in to stop things moving around on rough journeys but as far as moving it goes, its a very heavy machine! It works on both 110v & 240v so wherever we go in the world it’ll work. If we lose electricity then we go old school and we can use our manual embosser. Our manual embosser can be tailored to work with any piece of metal, so if things got really bad, I think we’d be cutting up old car panels up and using them for dog tags!
Q: What designs do you have in mind in the future? A: We’ve been having a lot of fun at conventions like Comic-con, Supanova and Armageddon so we’ll be increasing our Zombie range for those shows. The biggest thing in our future will be more customisation, we’d really like to offer a whole range of personalised Zombie Dog Tags. We are getting close to making this happen now so stay tuned as we might have some nice surprises coming up this year!
So there you have it, my thanks to Sgt. Slaughter and the ZombieDogTags team.
I've had a few good occasions to make use of this particular item, and thought I should give it a review.I covered the Tactical Pen a while back. I misplaced that pen but 2 is 1 and 1 is none ...
This was another Kickstarter item from the folks at Cybernetic Research Laboratories who previously produced the Tactical Whistle and the Tactical Cache. I wanted to "collect the set" of their products, because that's how I like to test not only the items, but the brand itself. More on that later.
This is a modular pen / hex-tool / stylus / glass-breaker with aggressive knurling and grips.
Machined from aircraft aluminium (with stainless steel and titanium options, too), I had my pen anodised in their "OD green" which matched the OD green their Whistle and Cache, which I must say, is a long way off what I expected Olive Drab to be. This could just be due to the sheen of it, (rather than being a matte finish). I think I should have gotten black.
The pen itself comes in four parts; The end cap, with a lanyard hole and a titanium clip. The main body, which is threaded internally, with three deep gripping groves. It is bored to accept a Fisher Space Pen cartridge from one end only.
Either end of the body can accept one of the various heads, in my case I have; the stylus end, the pen end, the tungsten carbide glass-breaker and the hex-bit driver (which I opted to get in titanium for additional resistance to wear).
Each of the heads have two different threads, one for attaching the head to the body, and the other for securing the cap to the head.
Interestingly, the cap can also take the tool-tips, including the pen with its cartridge.
This modularity makes this tool quite appealing, I tend to keep the glass breaker tip out and exposed, both for potential escape requirements I might have in punching out a window, but also for being a rather unpleasant pointy end to make my displeasure known. I've also used the carbide tip to scribe things onto metal.
The stylus tip is not very effective on my iPhone and iPad, but they did state this would be the case during the Kickstarter.
It's a functional tool, it makes senses as a backup item.
It's been a while since I've covered a belt, and I picked up this piece recently, and gave it a good workout over the weekend, so wanted to tell you about it.
With 22 rows of PALS/MOLLE looping, 18 of which are 3 row, with the two channels beside the buckle being only double channel sets. This gives both a lot of real-estate to work with, but also narrows the form around the front, giving the wearer unrestricted motion when sitting, squatting or kneeling.
It also sports 4 D-ring lash loops along the bottom, which could well be used for leg-straps too, if that's the way your mind works. The principle buckle is a large ITW buckle, as features on many of Platatac's gear. Twin webbing sliders allows you to adjust the belt from either side.
For my skinny (size 32) waist, I needed to cinch it all the way in on both sides, even when wearing it over belted pants and tucked in shirt. The up side of this is that if you have layered clothes, you will have no problem fitting it as an outer-wear layer.
Thankfully none of this kit was needed at the event, but the belt served me really well. The padding is mesh lined, giving it great weight bearing, as well as moisture management capacity.
I wore this rig just on my hips, no strapping, or braces, for 6 hours or so, including some running up and down stairs, with zero dramas. I would wear almost all the pouches identically, other then perhaps moving the 870 pouch to sit higher, if it was bearing more load, just to take advantage of the PALS/MOLLE attachments, but all in all, I was really happy with the belt. The webbing used for the buckles is sewn right into the body of the belt, wrapping the whole way around, and sits under the top. This made feeding the attaching straps of the pouches, both the Platatac-type integrated straps, and the Blackhawk STRIKE Speed Clips I use, a little tricky, but once in, they were rock solid. The overlap of the belt webbing and the middle row of channels makes it LOOK like its a staggered set of loops, but it isn't. Still, this adds to the stability and security of the belt! I might consider swapping out the ITW buckle for a Austrail Cobra buckle at some stage for climb-rating security, but otherwise this is an awesome addition to my load-out options.
Here's some obligatory tacticool shots of my load-out.
This very well crafted set of titanium lock picks, includes a variety of pick types, most of which are very uniquely designed. These are the TiPiKs.
As well as your more standard "hook" types, brad has designed several
combination rakes, with both half-diamond and half-round elements.
He also included a twin-faced tool, for double sided cam-locks (as seen in a lot of small cash-boxes, glass display cases and teenage diaries, apparently).
Each of the picks ends in a "quick flip" head, with a 3/16" hole to mound neatly in most key-keepers.
As well as the seven picks in this set, there are also two tension wrenches; one with a standard key-hole hole, for secure mounting, and the other with an ingenious and very highly machined "clip-on" tension wrench, which due to its high tolerance construction, and the innate properties of titanium, simple clips in and out of the far pin of the MINI TiKeY key-keeper, held in place by the tensioning washers.
What this leaves you with is a very compact set of very highly engineered picks, including two tension wrenches, in a very innocuous but pleasant looking package. I had my TiKeY MINI anodized in "steampunk bronze and blue" because that's how I roll, and I've really enjoyed using the set, and having it sit in my pocket, ready to pull out and fiddle with my collection of practice locks when I've had some time to kill.
Brad and I agree that the size of the head of the tension wrench can make it tricky to place, but the convenience of a small set more than makes up for the need for more dexterity. Compare it to the Oscar Delta titanium Bogata set, and you'll see for yourself.
The folks at GoST haven't been resting on their laurels, all this time, and have come up with an exciting development, to help counter the one shortfall of their shoes. Slipping on polished surfaces. Their solution? PAWS. Little silicone pads merged with the soles of the shoes mimicking the paw-pads of cats and dogs. I can't wait to try them.
Second item in the package was a set of the BAMANOS gloves; fingerless gloves made of the same foot-saving material, for those of us who grab, clamber and scramble. They also feature the PAWS upgrade.
The padded, broadly gusseted tongue not only keeps the laces from pinching and rubbing the foreleg (important for those of us with skinny legs), but it also acts to keep out debris, which has done so nicely.
