Spent a little time today knocking up a first attempt at a DIY Stem/Feed bag for on the bike. The idea is that you have a set of loops around the bag to shockcord or velcro onto the handlebars and then some more webbing loops across the bottom panel to connect to the fork crown so the bag stays snugly in place. The main grey material is some pretty thick vulcanised fabric I bought a while back specifically for bag making but the bag is lined with, well, my old tent!
A couple of weeks back I travelled up to Open Hardware Summit to both check out the talks and stuff, cover it for Raspberry Pi magazine, and to help run a panel on
Opensource Rocketry. In a fit of cheapness and adventure I schlep'd up on the train with camping gear and camped a bit out of town. We own loads of tents but I decided to take this 25 yr old Coleman 2 person tent. It's not a very lightweight tent but it was a good balance of size and weight for carrying it but not walking long distance with it, versus having a reasonable bit of room. It hadn't been used for a while so I re-waterproofed it the week before the trip. Sadly... whilst I spray treated it, I failed to generally inspect the seams and they'd failed in numerous places. I'd already patched and fixed numerous parts of it, so on return home, I decided to end of life the tent and use it for parts!
The bag is lined and I've used a part of the tent outer for the liner, and also for the small drawstring lid. I also used some of the binding from the tent for the binding around the upper edge of the bags main section.
I love my sewing machine! It's a Brother FS60 which I was given by a family member. It's really good, but projects like this definitely show that it's a machine mostly for fancy stitches in fine materials as opposed to stitching through multiple thick layers of fabric and webbing. I spent a lot of time struggling with the machine and I'm definitely up for picking up something a little more industrial at some point.
The bag works well, I'm obsessed with these super handy ranger bead knots which work well to cinch up the top section of the bag. There's plenty of space in it for even the largest water bottle. I'll use this one a little, but I'd like to make a matching pair eventually, but will probably try a few different designs. I've seen someone using using a rectangle as 3 sides of a square body and then an L shape rectangle to make the base and final side, seems like it would be simpler to produce. Also lots of people add pockets and other features which I'm keen to explore. There's also stuff to think about with the webbing mounts. I could make machine stitching easier by not making the webbing run through the bag seams, but also could potentially make bags that could be used not only mounted to bike handlebars, but potentially front fork bottle cages and also to other objects/rucksacks/packs etc.
