Author: Ben Brooks

When I started to settle on wanting to take the Mystery Ranch ASAP to the office everyday, I also started looking at laptop sleeves I could use to house my iPad Pros safely inside the bag. The Aer Tech Folio was one I kept looking at, but passing on because of the price and what I perceived as redundant nature of the storage didn’t seem like a good fit.

But I picked one up from the buy/sell/trade of my Member Discord and have quickly taken to this folio. It’s really smartly put together, and although it can be quite bulky, it does its job very well.

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When you start carrying more than just a knife on a daily basis, you find that you will need some method for organizing — so adding a pen and flashlight to my daily carry meant that things were becoming overloaded in my pocket. I need an organizer because this is Houston and there’s not many days of ‘jacket weather’ here where I can easily add pockets to my wardrobe.

I already talked about the Ripcord and Ripcord Mini — both of which are excellent, so today I want to talk about Yellow Birch Outfitter’s PocKit Modern Carry (shown in black on this article) and PocKit PICO Custom (shown below in coyote).

These are both very well made carry organizers, but their bulk works against them for me.

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I thought I cracked it — finally a fantastic everyday bag for the office. Something that blended in, organized well, carried what I needed, didn’t feel too bulky on my body, and most importantly was comfortable to wear. These bars are not high, as I park in a parking garage and simply take two elevators up to my office, but as it turns out — the little things always blow up many of the bags I tested.

That’s the story here: so very close to good, but at the end of the day the DSPTCH Daypack failed itself.

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The Micro Soft Shell is the second smallest of the wallets Slimfold offers, with the Nano being the smallest. If this wallet sounds familiar, I reviewed the original Tyvek version here where I ended up switching away. Recently some members of the Discord got this wallet and it looked good in the soft shell material so I figured I’d give it a go.

I’m a big fan of it, and despite my worries about the added bulk from the soft shell material, I actually find it to be really nice overall and much better than the Tyvek variant.

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Before getting this sling, I felt pretty confident that my sling setup was really comfortable and maybe even ‘set’. But this sling changed that, after what was an instant buy. The Forager line is not new for Mystery Ranch, but they previously were Asian-market-only, and you could find these slings on eBay and places like that for about $130 or so. Not cheap, not worth it. (The US market got the Forager pocket, which attaches to a hip belt and while nice looking, not that cool for those of us who loathe a hip belt.)

Now Mystery Ranch sells them to the US market for $32. What a deal!

And it is stellar, my favorite sling yet.

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Hyperlite Mountain Gear’s Versa is one of those sling bags you don’t expect to be any good, and you question because it seems much cheaper than you would expect for a bag made of Dyneema. At $70, it always seemed like a head scratcher: must not be good type of pricing.

I bought mine second hand for a heck of a deal and after using it for some time now, it has proven that it is a value even at the $70 full retail price tag. It is very light, and yet, incredibly versatile.

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I have now spent a lot of time testing out various models of Mystery Ranch backpacks (mostly the tri-zip models) and so I thought I would do a quick comparison of how you might think about which is right for you. Here you go, hope it helps someone:

UA21, ASAP, 2 Day Assault, 3 Day Assault CL

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Over on WIRED, Matt Jancer has an article titled: “The Best Hiking Gear (2021): Backpacks, Boxer Briefs, and More”. This article is not good. There’s so much advice for buying gear in here without any consideration given to what would actually be helpful for people who are looking at this type of guide.

I love hiking and being outdoors and I think everyone benefits from doing it. I also love gear and telling you what is the best, but I also think we need to caveat that. We need to focus on who the target audience is.

Don’t take my word for it, here’s how Jancer starts his article:

If you’ve never done it before, figuring out what to bring might seem like a daunting task, but it’s easier than you might think to stay dry, warm, hydrated, and safe. We have everything you need here.

His target: people who have ‘never done it before’. Ok then: the basics. Not a list for advanced people (which is good, because it’s shit for them too). This is everything you need, and just before that he talked about how it’s not expensive to get going with hiking, good stuff!

His list comes out to $1,024 — so cheap and easy to get started with!

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I’ve talked about the Mystery Ranch Urban Assault 21 before (a couple of times) — I love the bag. But there’s two other offerings of this bag: the Urban Assault 24 (which I don’t like the look and design of so I won’t try) and the Urban Assault 18. The 18 is the same as the 21, cut down in size to fit a smaller frame.

Mystery Ranch achieves this by only slightly trimming the width and depth of the bag, and wisely trimming the height from 20.25” in the Urban Assault 21, to 18.5” in the Urban Assault 18. The end result is a bag which has almost the same capacity and dimensions of the 21L, but is shorter to help fit shorter frames. I bought two of these, one for each of my daughters. They love them, even if they are still a little large on them.

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How do you keep a flashlight and knife in your pocket without everything lumping at the bottom of your pocket and scratching everything? You get a pocket organizer, and specifically you get these pocket organizers from ArcCompanyUSA on Etsy.

I love them, I have two Ripcords as they are perfection for my gear and have made carrying all this stuff simple and easy. What I love about both is that they are a single layer of finished Cordura on each side with good stitching to boot. I suspect this is 1000D Cordura but they come in many colors so I can’t comment on every color. You don’t need to read this review, you just need to buy one of each size: standard and mini.

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When you get deep enough into the flashlight abyss, far enough gone that no price for a flashlight seems like an absurd amount any longer – you’ll find yourself with two issues on your hands:

1. Where do you store all this stuff at your house?
2. How do you keep your extremely durable lights cozy and safe as you travel, since the idea of only taking one seems more crazy than ever?

I want to share some of my early explorations into storing flashlights with you, this is fun stuff.

Drawers w/ Foam

I have a couple of larger Pelican cases at home, which is the ubiquitous and accepted way to store lights, but I thought it sucked. It sucks because they closures are loud, and displaying a Pelican case somewhere convenient to stare at your flashlights so you can decide which you want for the day — is less than ideal for non-single-men.

Likewise, my beloved Drop EDC Valet simply doesn’t offer the room I need, and I find the add on drawer poorly executed overall. But I do have a set of these Bisley drawers — actually I stole them from my wife as they were hers, and they are excellent. From there I recommend two things:

1. These pick-n-pull foam inserts which you will need to cut down to size.
2. These drawer inserts from Bisley.

The 9 compartment drawer inserts work really well for storing batteries up to 18650 in size. They hold them well, and keep them in place with little fuss. I then use the foam inserts in two further drawers to create nested spots for my lights. The only caveat is that the drawers are deeper than you like, so I do cut a thin layer of the foam chunk I pull out (about 1/2” thick) and place it back in. That leaves a padded pocket for the lights to sit in.

Since you won’t be moving these drawers around, you don’t need the foam to hold the lights securely (like you would in a Pelican), so cut the openings larger and you still get no rattling from the lights, while being easy to retrieve them. I’ve cut only a few standard sizes into mine and that works well enough. If you did solid foam and custom cut, you could likely fit more per drawer.

I am extremely happy with this setup and it’s about what you might pay for a Pelican case with foam and all that.

Hard Sided Travel Cases

In my first attempt to create something for travel, I pulled out two older Pelican Micro Cases I have: a 1020 and a 1040. These cases don’t cost a ton and you can even buy foam for them for a low price from Pelican. (1020 foam, 1040 foam) I found that putting the foam into the case without removing the rubber insert gave the best fit overall, so that’s what I have done here.

Both cases seem to fit up to 18650 lights just fine and as you can see in the pictures, I can fit two lights in both cases. There’s two issues with this setup:

• For how few things they carry, they are very bulky.
• There’s a decent gap between the top of the foam and the top of the lid, but there’s no padding on the lid. So while this gives you a great view at the lights inside, there’s not a lot stopping a light from being jarred out of place and bouncing around in the case.

This isn’t a setup I am likely to use all that much, but if I wanted to protect a couple of lights when maybe going somewhere wet, this could be a solid option. Say kayaking, or boating — otherwise there are better options.

It sure as hell looks cool though.

Padded Pouches

This is where the actual useful gear is, right here, in the padded pouches department. Amazingly, no one has capitalized on the market of people who spend too much on flashlights, to create cases specifically for them — it will happen. For now, I’ve found a few good options.

Boker Plus Knife Vault Small

At just $25, this is an impressive pouch for what you get and I am glad this was recommended to me. This was designed for carrying knives, but easily carries many smaller lights. It has soft lining in each pocket and enough padding that your lights should hold up well. More than that it holds a bunch of stuff in a very compact and secure package.

All the openings are secured with velcro closures and wrapped in heavy nylon. This is a great buy, and where I recommend starting.

Tom Bihn

The Padded Organizer Pouches are fantastic little pouches for carrying a single light with perhaps an extra battery. What’s great about these is that they are really versatile, cheap, and easy to stash into gear. I didn’t know Tom Bihn made these, but they are fantastic.

Often I want to stash another light in a bag, say if we are going somewhere and I want to bring along a backup, but I don’t want to have to take up much space in the bag. This pouch works really well, and it also works really well for non-flashlight stuff too. These are aces, get a couple, toss in a light and an extra battery if you want — off you go. I’ll be traveling mostly with one of these for my lights.

These lights both fit if I angle them in, and they still don’t bump into each other.

I am looking at grabbing a larger one, and then stitching a vertical line down the center (as I did above) so that it get two compartments: then I can carry a light and batteries vertically on each side. I’ll report back when I do this.

Triple Aught Design S2

The Triple Aught Design S2 Pouch are designed for carrying lights and they work very well for it, but with caveats. The first being that these pouches are designed to be attached to something, that doesn’t mean you can’t store a light inside a bag in one, but you are better off with the Tom Bihn pouch if you don’t want to attach a light to something.

The good news is that these attach really well to MOLLE/PALS webbing and really any 1” webbing strap. So the internal MOLLE panel on the GR1 just became a prime space for storing lights in pouches. I find that most of my roughly 1” diameter lights fit in this pouch well. Unfortunately these have not been in stock for a while, so you’ll have to head to the used market, or find something similar on the bevy of tactical gear websites out there. If I am planning on being out with a bag hiking, these are my choice as they add to the utility of the gear, while still protecting the light.

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What I have found that doesn’t work well: drawers without organizers, and large Pelican cases. What I would really like to find is something a little wider than the Bisley, but about on part with the rest of the dimensions for my house. And for travel: I’d love something like the Lochby Quattro, but for 1” lights — four lights seems ideal to me, overkill, but ideal.

I was looking through the Weltool catalog of lights a while back, and stumbled upon the M6 Mini. I clicked on it because it had the catchy tagline: “Golden-Eyed Tiger Cub”. I cannot answer what this means.

But for $19 with Prime shipping, I snagged the light because it seemed to offer something unique and interesting. It’s a small flashlight with a specific goal of a very round output of even light. I’ll explain, but the truth is: this flashlight is far more handy than you’d give it credit for on the surface.

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My first pair of GORUCK’s MACV-1 boots never had a laces issue, as I wore them until I wore out the tread with the same laces the entire time. So I was a little surprised to see that my most recent pair (purchased January of 2021) was starting to have the laces fray in a spot. I decided this was a good opportunity to see what else was out there, because while I have never complained a ton about the stock GORUCK ‘speed laces’ I’ve never really loved them either.

The speed laces are pretty slick, this means they pull tight easily, but also that they are prone to becoming uneven while knots also don’t hold as well as you might like for shoe laces.

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