Monday, October 7, 2013

Praxis: Fight Light. Cutting down on weight. Alternate uses for drinking straws.

Forwarded by my son: Link.

4 comments:

Dakota said...

Great tip, I have used a Daisy Seal A Meal for years for sealing up things and keeping them dry and fresh in my gear. The straws are a better medium for oils, antibiotic cream, poison ivy cream, burn creams etc for sure. Will be doing some of this immediately.

rexxhead said...

Bookmarked.

pdxr13 said...

Spices, yes. Firestarter, yes.

Olive oil, no. This needs an MSR/Cascade Designs flexi-bottle. Olive oil is used by the Ounce, not the milliLiter. Getting rid of the glass bottle will save plenty of weight and possible breakage. Same for peanut butter. Ziplock bag over flexi-bottle as leak insurance. Oil on your gear sucks.

Drugs? Bzzzzz. Especially prescription drugs that might have a classification. Un-labeled pills often are "confusing" for under-trained official thugs. Medical creams for wounds are sterile in the original container, but in a straw not so much. Half-a-tube is already perfect.

Seal-a-meal or similar boil-bags are most excellent when made into small pouches with a hand heat-sealer. Breaking up food into measured amounts (one meal, one pot) that are waterproof and in separate packs is worth the slight weight/space penalty and prevents wasteful mistakes when tired/cold/hungry.

Paper-wrapped medical supplies can be waterproofed. Ammo seals up nice. Wax-soaked, strike-anywhere matches by the dozen in a wax-dipped small cardboard stiffener, vacuum-sealed is just right. Don't forget to add a dessicant pack to things that need to stay very-dry (even home-made from baked gypsum wallboard).

If an item absolutely positively must not be crushed or leaked from/on-to, put it in a Nalgene hard bottle. I've picked up a dozen BPA-free 1L and 500mL in the past 60 days at thrift shops and G-sales.

Cheers.

Anonymous said...

I think the best use was for the fire starters. The use of straw pieces for Neosporin seemed silly when you could just take the small size tube of the product with you. I think a better fishing rig could be kept in a small sized empty Rx bottle. The biggest hook you could put inside a drinking straw would be unlikely to catch a fish big enough to eat. But, what does this old man know?

- Old Greybeard