This is an idea I have been toying around with for a little.  It's a padded riggers belt.  1.75 inch wide 3mm closed cell padding and a 1.5 inch piece of scuba webbing wrapped in 500 Denier Cordura with a 1 inch webbing accent and a 1 inch cobra buckle.









I'm tinkering with the design.  I will probably move the female end of the cobra buckle right next to the edge of the padded webbing, and not sew down the first 3 inches of the 1 inch webbing to the padded part on the male side to allow the belt to overlap a little when tightened.

I'm going to wear it around for a while and see how I like it.

Chuck

Back on DIY I had posted my patent pending soda bottle thread cone adapter as a tip for a simple and mostly free way to use a thread cone on your home machine. Today I have another super simple tip to share. PALS grids take forever to sew, there isn't much in ways around it. I played with jigs, templates, and a bunch of other stuff trying to speed it up, but ended up going with this really simple step. Run a strip of masking tape 1/4" to one side of the stitch on your PALS grid and follow it with the edge of your presser foot. (1/4" to the side assuming your presser foot is 1/2" wide) It would be nice if the tape was 1" wide, but its 15/16" so keep track of which side it is offset to. The masking tape also does a good job of keeping the webbing lined up in your grid so you don't have to keep measuring between rows.


Patent Pending Soda Bottle Thread Cone Adapter, it always pulls straight up so you can use a cone on your home machine without a thread tree.

Just a suggestion here.  I think it would be cool if gearmaker.org had a youtube channel that you could use to pull in some people who are interested about making gear, but don't know where to start.

I think the channel could feature videos of how to do stuff from making mag pouches on house-hold machines to how to select your first industrial machine. 

Users on this forum could record and produce videos, send them to you via drop box, and you could select which to upload or not 

There is just so much crap out there on youtube if you search for "tactical sewing" or "how to make your own mag pouch".  I think we (as a community of gear makers) have a opportunity to own this, and get in on the ground floor.

Thoughts?

Chuck