Lightening Up with Zpacks Gear

     So I continue my progression towards lighter backpacking gear, and just got a shipment of just a few things from Zpacks.  Zpacks makes ultralight backpacking gear, it’s a small company run by Joe Valesko and his wife, along with a few employees, located in Florida.  Many of their products are custom made from cuben fiber material.  They sell tarps, backpacks, and many ultralight accessories, including stuffsacks made from cuben fiber.  The gear is mostly made by them, is high quality from what I have seen, and, as I like my gear, well thought out and designed.

     I recently got a stuffsack made of ultralight cuben fiber material .It’ a good size either for my summer sleeping bag, or my Hennessy hammock.  It could also be used for a small to medium sized pot set.  I will likely get another one or two of these stuffsacks if this one holds up well.  And it looks like it would.  I also got some seam tape to so I can tape the seams of this stuffsack myself and make the stuffsack more water resistant, if I want to use it for my sleeping bag.  Along with that, I got a cuben fiber peg bag.

     Zpacks also sells ultralight food  storage/hanging components, so I picked up some of those.  I got a super light Blast rolltop food bag , which is made of their more durable Blast cuben fiber and has a Velcro closure at top, and loops for a caribiner.  Speaking of which, it comes with a micro caribiner, the smallest and lightest one I have ever seen, although it does seem strong enough for the job.   I also got a cuben fiber rock bag to put rocks or pebbles into for using as a weight when hanging food.  

     To round it out, I got 50 feet of 1.75mm Spectra Dyneema  z-line, 450lb breaking strength.  Arborists specifically use this rope as throw lines to perform the same function as a bear bag line, to sling over a branch and haul things up into the tree.  The line has next to no stretch, unlike nylon rope.  It’s outer coating is slick – I believe  it has an outer coating of vinyl to lower friction and will be awesome for pulling up heavy food loads over branches…  I just gotta make sure the knots I tie in it will hold.  The line is so thin it has a high visibility blaze orange color so you can hopefully avoid clotheslining yourself or others.  Without using it yet, this rig at least looks like a huge upgrade and some significant weight savings over my current hanging gear I use – a 3/16” nylon rope, a full sized caribiner heavy enough to be a throw weight, and a paddling dry bag that is overbuilt for it’s purpose of just hold my food and being somewhat water resistant

     A last item I got was a Zpacks toothbrush.  While it actually weighed more than my 1/3 toothbrush with the cut off handle, it is a more reasonable length and more funtional than my older backpacking toothbrush.  I basically had to put my fingers in my mouth to bush my teeth with my older one...  which some people do..  some ultralightists use silicone fingertip toothbrushes intended for pets and children mainly. 

Old fashioned-ish backcountry gear on right

     I weighed my older gear and the Zpacks replacements... shows I saved 351 grams.  Not bad for a few items!

Links:
Zpacks

Making My Own Paddle Part 3 – Finishing the Paddle

     As is typical with some things I get into, I was a bit obsessive with the finishing of my self-made paddle after I brought it home.  I used 60, 120, 180, 200 grit sandpapers both hand sanding and with a palm sander to polish up the finish and also create the transition profile from blade to shaft the way I wanted it to.  It has a nice ridge that extends about 8 inches from the initial transition, and I aggressively took material out of the blades on either side, so it is close to consistent thickness all the way to just before the tip.

     I also filled in a small indentation on the shaft with epoxy mixed with wood flour from the sanding, and polished up all the surfaces with medium and 0000 steel wool, to an almost shiny surface.  By holding the paddle up to a light source, imperfections were identified and sanded out.  Yep, like I said, a little too much obsession for just a paddle… even before the finishing.

     I was thinking initially of maybe woodburning something into my paddle, but at this point I don’t know if I need to do that.  I now know this piece of wood quite intimately and will quite easily be able to identify it, either from a distance or up close.  I was quite happy with it already.

Now for the obsession on how to finish it.After much research, I decided on polymerized tung oil. I am almost a tung oil expert with the amount of info I have read on it.  It’s certainly not a simple brush on one or two coats on the surface and you are good to go type of finish, it’s much more involved.

Tung oil is one of the best ‘drying oil’ finishes available.  Drying oil means it forms a plastic-like film as the molecules in the oil cross link to each other, otherwise called drying, or polymerizing.  Tung oil cones from the nut of the Tung tree  and as a finish, it is similar to linseed oil, but it doesn’t yellow with time and is less likely to form mildew as linseed oil can, and also more expensive.  Tung oil is one of the oldest wood finishes known, the Chinese used to use it to protect ships hulls from the water.  It comes from the oil of the tung tree nut.  The resulting finish is deeply penetrated into the wood, is hard, flexible, and will form a watertight barrier.  It fills pores and voids in the wood, so it also makes the wood less likely to dent when impacted.  The standard tung oil apparently takes forever and a day to dry/polymerize by itself.  Polymerized oil is oil that has been heated up to partially polymerize it already and greatly speed up the drying.  I went to Lee Valley which sells proper real tung oil, really one of the only places that sells proper tung oil in Canada.  It is thinned with solvents to 50% oil, as polymerized tung oil is as thick as honey in it’s pure state.   The tung oil Lee Valley sells is actually made by Sutherland Welles and branded for Lee Valley.  They also sell a sealer, but it’s not worth purchasing it.  The sealer is just an even more thinned tung oil to 20% oil, which you can easily do yourself by adding a solvent.  I learned this after the fact, so I purchased a 1litre bottle of the poly tung oil (which is a costly $45, that was the only size available from Lee Valley!), and a 250ml bottle of the sealer, which I intended on using for the first couple coats.

     The idea at first is to get the finish to soak deep as possible into the wood by highly diluting it with a solvent.  In my case I chose Turpentine, which is the best solvent to use, but also the most expensive type of finish.Turpentine also helps bring So I diluted the sealer by about half for the first coat, which would make it only 10% tung oil.  It was very thin, allowing it to soak in and penetrate as deep as it could.  Initially wiping on the oil transforms the wood instantly into a thing of beauty, bringing out the full grain, so amazing looking, I couldn’t stop looking at it.  While the oil and solvent was soaking in, I also wet sanded the paddle with 800grit wet sanding paper.

      This followed with maybe 10 more applications of gradually lowered ratios of Tung oil to solvent, and sanding with some steel wool in between.  After several applications, it starts soaking into the wood.  After that, it’s basically filling in all the small indentations, pores and imperfections on the surface making a super smooth finish.  For almost all of the coats, the oil was wiped from the surface and rubbed in as it thickened.  After working with it for this project, I’ve found polymerized tung oil to be an interesting finish, as you can adjust it for how you want the final finish to look and feel.  You can make it so you feel the grain by applying less coats.  Tung oil buffed with 0000 size steel wool is very beautiful in this way, and matte.  However, I couldn’t resist I choosing to have a slightly higher finish build on my paddle, for more protection against scratches, water and for a beautiful high gloss finish.  But it is a little trickier and less forgiving.  I applied 1-2 coats thinned with turpentine and not wiping it off.  But you can’t touch the surface, and make sure you  apply evenly.  I made the blade higher gloss than the handle.  The handle will get matte anyways from the handling.  It took me several weeks of applications where I am now satisfied I can stop finishing it and actually use it.  Although I have yet to use it and see how it weathers ages and wears, I’m ultra happy with my choice of polymerized tung oil over boiled linseed oil.  Brings out the grain amazingly, and seems like it will have a good protective layer, it also looks clear and not yellow like linseed oil, also does not smell much at all, unlike linseed oil.  I highly recommend the polymerized tung oil.  Another tip I have learned is to squeeze the bottle and get rid of as much air as possible from the bottle for storage, so it doesn’t polymerize and get gummy during storage. 

     The black cherry wood my paddle is made of is a beautiful material as well.   The grain structure, color and flaws in the wood are beautiful.  Mine happens to be two tone with different heart wood and sap wood colors.  It is a strong wood, although a bit more heft than the soft wood paddles.  I contoured my paddle at the shaft to handle transition to lighten up the paddle as much as I could, and thinned the blade so it is stiff to moderate flex.

     I may have obsessed about this paddle much more than I really intended to, but making your own paddle and finishing it a great project.   I like working with wood and I gained some experience and learned a lot about woodworking and the interesting tung oil finish I used.  I’m proud of my paddle now and my paddling will be more soulful with a paddle I made myself, instead of some low quality off the shelf paddle, even though they will perform similar.  The only problem now is I am hesitant to use my paddle and ding it up, I’d like to hang it on my wall.  But I made it for paddling, so paddling it is.  I am interested to see how the length and tripper style of paddle matches what I want out of a paddle.  Paddle on!

Related Posts:

Making My Own Paddle Part 1

Making My Own Paddle Part 2

Links:

Bruce Smith Paddles 
Tung oil history and uses

 

Salomon X-ultra Mid GTX Boots

     I am slowly transitioning my gear to be lighter weight where it makes sense.  I am not an ultralight nut, but even when I was a kid, I wondered why hiking boots were so massively heavy with the full leather uppers soaked in dubbin and the 1 inch thick vibram soles.  I transitioned to the light hiker mid boots a decade ago and went through two pairs of Lowa Renegades.  They were awesomely comfortable right out of the box, except for they could have been just a tad wider for my toes, especially while wearing multiple socks.  They were some of the lightest boots around when I first started using them, but now they are heavy for what they are.  There’s no need for the uppers to by all full leather, when there’s the GTX membrane under them.  Boots were made from leather initially because there was no Gore-Tex, and the leather was meant primarily for waterproofing, and remotely secondarily for wear resistance, but there’s not much need for leather on boots today in my opinion.  It also does not have a good toe cap and the sole starts separating from leather upper when wet.  Being a good designer means to question and scrutinize every detail of a design and material choices, and change that if it isn’t optimal .  The same goes for being a consumer, blindly picking something because you like the brand or something looks cool is a stupid thing to do.    Think about how and why you use things while you make conscious choices for your gear and you will be happier for it.

     In any case, last year I badly needed some new boots for my trip to Borneo as the seams had exploded on my Lowa Renegades near the toe box.  I initially went to MEC and got some Salomon 4D GTX boots.  They looked like good sturdy boots and would be very comfortable, but when I got home, I started thinking about them more, and they were just massive and overkill for what I need.  They are the same weight as my renegades, higher rise and looked like they would be quite hot when walking around the jungles and streets of Kota Kinabalu or the jungles.  They look like they would be good for heavy duty expeditions with high backpack loads but that’s not what I needed.

I went back to MEC to return the Salomon 4D boots and got some Keen Gypsum boots because that was almost the only thing they had in the range I needed and my size.  I have found these to be not too bad.  They are still heavy with a good amount of needless leather in the uppers, and too much ankle padding.  The lace design also makes it difficult to cinch the boots firmly to my foot for some reason.  There are some good things - the toebox is large and my feet don’t feel cramped.  My main reason for needing to get new boots is that the 10.5 size is slightly too short for my feet and hammer my big toes.  In fact the toenails on both my big toes don’t grow properly any more from years of smashing my toes on the front of my ski boots and hiking boots.  In any case, I need new boots this year.

     The range of boots on the market has literally exploded recently and is very confusing to anyone buying a boot/shoe for outdoor use.  There’s everything from barefoot hiking shoes to expedition mountaineering boots.  The area of the light hikers/trail runners has seen the most growth, but I still can’t tell the difference between some models even offered by the same company, some look exactly the same.   I just thought of, and looked for what I needed in a boot. 

     I have strong ankles, so support really isn’t needed much for myself.  I prefer to have a GTX liner – true, open mesh breathes much, much better, but I don’t want to be tiptoeing around muddy areas on the trail like a princess or else getting a muddy soaker.   I do like a higher boot to keep out sand and pebbles out of my shoe, and also increase the soaker resistant depth for water crossings.  A slightly higher boot also reduced banging my ankle on rocks as I make my way through rocky areas.  I want something light, that does not have a leather upper  - as I mentioned earlier leather uppers are unnecessarily heavy, and they don’t dry quick either.  I also didn’t want those thin quick laces as seen on many runners nowadays, I don’t trust them for multi day hikes.   This blog entry from Freelance Trekker isn't a fan of them at all.  I also want proper laces so I can tie them tight for downhills. 

So, I ended up with the Salomon X-Ulta Mid GTX.  A light runner like shoe/boot hybrid with minimal leather in the upper, small toe cap and a slightly higher upper than a runner, and a waterproof breathable GTX liner.  Perfect… I think.  As always, I look forward to testing my new piece of gear and will report back for a longer term test after I get some use out of them.

Links:

Salomon X-Ultra Mid GTX