Assembling my ultra-mini kit (
HERE ) was super fun and caused me to tinker with my larger kit, which was even more fun. My inspiration was actually slaughtering the famous Doug Ritter PSK (nicknamed DR-PSK)
http://www.equipped.org/psp/index.htm and some of that gear went into my mini kit and some into this kit.
The philosophy of this kit is that it should stand on it's own with regards to shelter, fire, emergency repair and signaling - and in particular to hold all my emergency repair gear.
This kit is first and foremost a kit for my backpack/waistpack/daypack-whatever-pack-I-wear that day. Even if I did allow myself to indulge with a bit redundancy and excess gadgets, it is still small enough to fit a coat pocket. It weighs about a pound or slightly more.
It is also very unlikely that I shall wind up with this kit and not having at least a water bottle of some sort. For reasons discussed earlier, I allow myself not to worry much at all about collecting and cleaning water for drinking.
Enough talk, let's see what I came up with:
Emergency poncho in its small own zip-bag and some really flat goodies from DR-PSK:
Survival instructions (DR-PSK)
Rite-in-the-rain paper (DR-PSK)
Aluminium foil (DR-PSK)
Scapel (DR-PSK)
Fire starter and tinder (similar to DR-PSK)
Mini compass
Whistle (similar go DR-PSK)
Signal mirror (from DR-PSK)
It all goes into the poncho zip bag above.
Excesses in sewing: My home-brewed sewing kit along with the needle/clothespin/fish hook-vial from DR-PSK. I put a pre-threaded needle in an old pencil-refill container and wrapped the thread around the base. A second needle is big enough to accomodate inner strands from paracord as sewing thread.
Assembling the main bag (zip-lock bag)
Heavy duty thrashbag
Super-glue and ultra-thin pencil (from DR-PSK) in a plastic vial (came as packaging for some kid toys)
About 30 feet of thin nylon line
Compass
Old leatherman tool
Clothespin/sewing kit/fishing kit from DR-PSK.
A mini-bic lighter protected with PET plastic cut out from a bottle of Heinz' tomato ketchup. They have such nice corners to protect the gas valve... (Also shown in a previous post, but this picture is much better...)
Add some zip ties, a snickers bar (not shown) and 3 feet of yellow paracord (not shown, but you can see it below).
The bag is being taped with gorilla tape along the edges and about 8 feet is wrapped around the bottom. Wrapping with gorilla tape has become some of a rite-of-passage for gear that I want to use out in the wild.
Here is the final kit (bottom left), along with some of its friends:
Bottom right: The ultra-mini PSK I showed
HERETop left: My favourite bivy bag, mini-tarp, windbreak et al discussed
HERE. A tested, tried-n-true piece of equipment. 15 years and still going strong.
Top right: AMK emergency bivy bag.
Under the AMK bivy bag is a generic space blanket.
Room for improvement- Replacing that multitool with one that has a saw.
- A BCB commando wire saw (the consensus seems to be that this is the only kind of wire saw worth considering).
- A flashlight. I'll add one when it starts getting dark at night again (only 3 hours of twilight at night right now).
- A fixed blade knife (I usually wear one at my hip when I bring this kit anyway, and there's also a Doug Ritter mk 5 in my mini kit).
- Some container for melting snow and boiling water, possibly in the shape of a square box to hold these items
Overall, I'm quite happy about this kit! I can certainly see this kit tagging along on lots of occasions, essentially whenever and wherever I bring some kind of bag and a repair kit could prove handy.
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