Retrofit Aarn front pockets

[Gusto]

Hi all,

I have just bought the large/expedition sized Aarn Front pockets. I am hoping to sew a little adapter strap so that I can fir them to hip belt of my current pack. Before doing so I thought that I should ask if anyone else has done such a thing before and has some words of wisdom and/or some photos of what they did.

I was thinking of making it so that it's not permanently sewn on to my hipbelt mostly because it would be easier on my sewing machine if I didn't stick it to the hip belt. I also don't want to void the warranty on my pack either. I know hour to do the stud part, I have access to a stud press.

Thanks in advance. I'm heading off on holidays today. I am going to do a few days of the Great Ocean Walk. I'll next be online in 2 weeks. So plenty of time for people share there advice before I used the sewing machine.

Cheers

[photohiker]

There was a post on BPL of someone who did this.

On an Aarn pack, the pockets have an aluminium brace that drops into a socket sewn into the hipbelt. Should be relatively easy to duplicate on another pack I guess. Could take a bit of trial and error to get it sorted though.

[wazzawalkin]

There was also a thread on this site about fitted AARN pockets to a Wilderness Equipment pack.

W.

[icemancometh]

I have climbing packs that have gear loops or at least ice clipper slots so I clip them and then put the AARN pockets on via that and the usual attachments

[benandlara]

I have a pair of (framed) aarn front packs I use on a frame-less Mountain Laurel designs Cuben Exodus. It is a simple bag (about 50 litres for about 500g) with little easy on the move storage space…….unless you add the exquisite shoulder strap bags or hip pouches. It is fine being frameless until you have four days food and 4kg of water. AARN luckily sells a $15 (AUD) hipbelt holster. It is about a 6.5 cm high loop with an alloy strut one side and the insertion clip sits low so it will not spin on the belt. Luckily the loop slides over the relatively simple MLD foam hip belts and stops at the right spot without further alteration.

The pivoting pouches have an alloy strut that slips into a pocket and clips in. The smallest framed front bags are $90 (AUD). They hold only 5 or 6 litres of volume but my aim was for this to be dense (eg. Water, Pegs, trail mix, camera….). This puts 4kg of weight to the front and onto the hip belt rather than the shoulder straps (and frameless main bag). The pouches are designed to sit clear of your chest to allow air flow and putting some weight forward allowed me to loosen the shoulder straps and a bit more air flow for my back.
The modifications I made was firstly to add a second mid-line clip to join the bases of the front packs (AARN only uses one now) as I wanted more stability with a small dense packet.... and I use 2 small carabiners to clip each bag to the shoulder strap daisy chain. The weight is transferred through the 30 cm alloy strut so the top attachment is mainly for stability so shock cord could be another option.
End result was I lost 120g of MLD pouches and a sternum strap for 265g of AARN front pouches.

The front pouches can still pivot out if you release the midline clips as AARN intends them too. The MLD pack was unaltered and the hip belt seems to be ok after >300km of usage.