I was complaining on Twitter that almost everyone who makes shoulder bags makes terrible straps to go with them and that it’s the most important thing to get right and nobody does and everything is terrible. You know, as one does. And I mentioned modifying my bags to make the straps work right, and people seemed interested in what I did, so off we go.
Here’s a decent enough shot of what I’ve done to the bag I bought a while ago. Briefly:
- That entire buckle and d-ring assembly in the upper left does one job: it moves the place you cinch down the strap from the middle of my chest, where it used to live, to the bottom of the bag. This means that lifting the bag up and cinching it snug is a single motion in one direction, instead of trying to hoist the bag upwards with one hand to get some slack while pulling down with the other to tighten it down; it makes a big difference if you’re carrying a load.
- The metal wire you see looped through the chest buckle is insurance; might be unnecessary, but I don’t quite trust that part of this exercise to stay put on its own.
- The small strap you see hanging off the d-ring at about 11:00 is a quick-release; set up like this it stays nice and snug until I give little tug on that and it all comes slack. You can sort of see how that works here:
- You can’t clip your keys easily to this strap as shipped, which really sucks. The extra d-ring in that second picture is for that.
- The bit with the two aluminum rings there is a replaced support strap, that works the same way; I can cinch it down easily once it’s on, one loop keeps the strap from dangling everywhere and putting a thumb through the lets me pop it off easily. There’s a cheap plastic caribiner hanging off the end of the bag that I can clip those to if I’m not using them, so they stay out of the way.
- Finally, down in the bottom right, I’ve added some extra slotted-loop rings to the ends of the straps that hold the bag closed, so that they don’t flap around everywhere either.
So there you have it. About ten bucks worth of extra bits and a bit of extra thought has moved this bag from “very good” to “close to perfect”, quickly adjustable and a little more pleasant to interact with when you’ve got a lot to carry.
This is was I was going on about on Twitter, if anyone’s still reading at this point. It doesn’t take much; a bit of consideration, getting the parts, making the change. Repairability, as always, matters way more than it seems at first. Don’t buy a work bag if you can’t replace the straps with something worthwhile; I bet eventually you’ll want to. And when the part of a thing you interact with the most somehow gets the least attention, just that little bit of giving a damn can go a very long way.