Category: Gear

DIY: GORUCK Shoulder Strap

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[There was to be something longer here but, honestly, this whole thing boils down to “I liked GORUCK’s old shoulder straps, I have GORUCK bags without shoulder straps, and GORUCK no longer sells the type of shoulder strap I like so I’ll make my own.” So.]

GORUCK used to make and sell the best shoulder strap I’ve ever seen – dual tri-glide adjust, just-right-width nylon webbing, and solid metal clips. They still sell a shoulder strap, but it has a section of sewn-on padding in the middle, and

  1. Said padding puts a rather high lower limit on the shortest length to which the strap can be adjusted, plus
  2. If you need padding on a cross-body shoulder strap, you should most likely be reëvaluating your load-carrying equipment choice(s).

(And, y’know, at $35 a strap, and given the number of GORUCK bags I have that could take a shoulder strap, less the number of shoulder straps I have already… why not DIY?)

Parts: Wasn’t too picky about the webbing or the tri-glides, but the snaps I wanted to be just right. My brother finally found these for me – 1 ½” Metal Snaphooks from Tom Bihn. (Cue sectarian strife over the mixing of Tom Bihn and GORUCK.) They’re a touch smaller, but otherwise appear identical to the snaps on my original GORUCK straps.

A few quick measurements gave 60.75″ for the total length of the webbing for the GORUCK strap, so I called it 5′ and cut and melted the edges of the nylon webbing. (No picture because one, it was blurry, and two, it’s exactly what it sounds like – five feet of loosely folded nylon webbing.)

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The first tri-glide attached. Note that my sewing machine had trouble going through three layers of heavy nylon webbing, so while the end-folds were machine-stitched, the tri-glide attachment was done by hand.
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The first of the snaps attached with the rest of the strap threaded back through the tri-glide.
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Finished strap, cinched down.

GORUCK Rifle Case / LaRue Covert Rifle Case

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Note: You can’t actually buy the GORUCK Rifle Case at the moment (it’s been available through a pre-order, an initial run, and a second pre-order to date). It’s probably 50/50 if it becomes standard production this time around, and even then, outside of their core rucks GORUCK often comes and goes on inventory.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with this; it’s just a different mentality that you have to be willing to accept. GORUCK is a small, high-quality, American-made gear company; they don’t have a logistics tail of Chinese factories & warehouses [although, fine, I admit that I don’t know where their Cordura, thread, etc. comes from…] nor front-end resellers buying in bulk.

Up-front for what it’s worth, if the GORUCK case had been available when I bought the LaRue case, I would have ponied up the extra for the GORUCK case. I’m happy with the LaRue case, but I’m also a GORUCK aficionado.

Now that I have both, though, they’re similar enough and different enough that I’ve got a better understanding of both of them; enough to provide a bit more of an overview than “Yup, it’s a case, it holds a rifle.”

Further note that my point of view on this is that of an OCPD geek. If you want to improve your shooting, buy a case of cheap ammo and go practice. If you want to take a piece of gear downrange, buy a pallet and test it to destruction yourself.

If you’re bummed that Sortimo T-BOXXen still aren’t readily available stateside and really wish that we could all just get along and choose one of MIL-STD-1913 / KeyMod / M-LOK already, then yeah.=ƎE=)

Both cases are advertised / designed to either hold an assembled SBR or a broken-down carbine or rifle. (I’m using my go-to AAC 300 BLK 9″ and a Noveske Light Recce 16″ here.)

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Challenge: Accepted

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I don’t run. At least, I didn’t run, apart from a few 5Ks here and there, the Charlottesville 10-Miler a couple of times because a bunch of people from morning workout were running in it, that sort of thing.

But, and this is important, I do stupid things. Admittedly, less “Of course I can chug that!” stupid and more “12 overnight hours and 20+ miles of cross-country log-carrying tactical-movement with a rucksack full of bricks? With another one the next afternoon? Why not!” stupid.

(In fairness, however, it was only a Challenge-Light, not a Challenge-Challenge or HCL. I may do stupid things, but I am not a moron.)

So I decided to run the Richmond Marathon last year on a whim. And I accepted my brother’s challenge that if I could get out of bed the next morning (loft bed with railings and a ladder, so trickier than just rolling to one side) I’d sign up for the Seashore State Park 50K that December.

Unfortunately, the 50K was full up by the time of the marathon. Darn. Still, with a rucksack full of food, water, and a pre-race outer layer that I was too stubborn and Norwegian-Lutheran to actually discard and so got stuffed in on top of the 3L hydration bladder, I finished.

(I had covered this distance before [more or less, and spread out over between the Challenge-Light…] and I was used to moving with a rucksack, to be fair.

[And I sweat… profusely, so dehydration was a concern for me.])

A while after that, some guy made the internet for running a half-marathon in a suit, and right after that the cofounder of Ministry of Supply ran a much faster half-marathon in one of their just-released Aviator 2 suits.

Continue reading “Challenge: Accepted” →