harald

There’s currently a sell-off of a 100 Liter (no idea much this is cubic inches) inflation bag on German eBay and similar sites, for around 5 Eurones. Just in time,  as I anyway wanted to build an XXL inflation bag. The Produkt is called Fluxbag:…[Read more]

I recently learnt that a good dishwasher fluid to detect leaks is Fairy Ultra diluted one plus ten. This is what people use in homemade formulas to blow giant soap bubbles. Works better than the no name stuff I used before. You have to cover the whole raft in detergent and wait a while for all leaks to show up.

Someone must have read your post :-). This feature is now available in the Nortik Duo Expedition packraft. The raft has two internal bags which are sealed with watertproof zippers. I guess that the internal pressure on the bags keeps air and water out. Found no reviews on the performance, but here’s a pic:…[Read more]

Hi Christian,

here’s everything on one photo.

– The collar of the bottle is sandwiched for stability between two circles of fabric. The flap (in red) can be any type of tissue. As a valve this works the better the higher the pressure. I use it only to assist with manual inflation, so high precision was not my goal. (The dirt on the blue…[Read more]

Since my inflatable seat was developing leak after leak I glued one together using vinyl cement and some cheap (20 Eurones) white 500g/sqm vinyl (PVC tarpaulin) from ebay. Works like a charm, no leaks, I did not even bother to add seam strips.

Since the seat worked so well I decided to build a packraft prototype from the rest of the vinyl. The…[Read more]

It might interest you that a similar technique was used in olden times for field repairs of wooden folding Kayaks with a PVC fabric skin: PVC was scraped with a heated knife from PVC patches (or fabric they carried for that purpose) and then the hot PVC was smeared with the hot knife on the area to be patched. Requires obviously some skill.

There’s a Russian packraft boutique who uses this valve hack on their packrafts:https://www.birdypackraft.com/. There’s actually a lot of packrafting going on in Russia, if you know how to use Google translate or Deepl. Personally, I don’t like the Boston valve much. Its too bulky and too protruding. I would go for a bottle cap opening for bag…[Read more]

I got a sample of a transparent TPU sheet from a German shop: https://www.diekleinewerft.de/TPU-Folie-152cm-breit-038mm-dick-semitransaprent

(They also have TPU tubes for making bladders.)

Unfortunately, this TPU has a much higher melting point than Matt’s fabrics. Since the material has not a fabric backing it warps if its heated and the warps…[Read more]

Hi there, greetings from Germany.