Bag O' Tricks(tm) - Wordage on cordage
I don’t think there’s anyone who could argue that paracord isn’t a handy item to have. People use it to replace their shoelaces, weave it into bracelets and belts, or just keep big hanks of it in their gear, in order to always have some handy.
True paracaord is made of multiple strands of smaller cordage, usually seven strands, and those strands are usuall made of three smaller strands. (Don’t quote me on those numbers.) The cheap Chinese knock off stuff is just a nylon sleeve with some sort of poly fiber core. Avoid that crap. Spend the money, get the good stuff. Take a deep breath, tense up your core, and pay the money for a giant spool of the stuff. There’s no point in doing things halfway and buying, say, 100′ of the stuff and thinking “that’ll do it.” There’s just so much to do with paracord.
For me, the reason I carry it in the Bag O’ Tricks is to tie doors open, tie doors shut, hoist things up to places, secure things closed, hold things open, create lanyards for gear, etc, etc. Dude, there are hundreds of reasons to have a generous amount of this stuff in your gear. But the problem is, how the heck do you store the stuff? I mean, you want it to be stored in such a manner that it doesn’t turn into a rats nest that leaves you standing there with a Gordian know of paracord.
Originally, I simply rolled all my paracord into ball, like yarn, and then wrapped it in a couple cut-inner-tube-rubber-bands to keep it from unspooling itself. But, there were a couple problems… Most of the time it worked out just fine, but more than a few times the rough-n-tumble of tossing my bag around would sometimes overcome my efforts and things would get all tangle-y. The other problem was that for the amount of paracord I wanted to keep in my bag (the more, the better) the ball of cord was fairly substantial and not a very efficient use of space in my bag.
Originally, I figured the simple solution was to simply wind the cord around something to keep it one place. I tried several different ways of dong it but everything seemed to fall short. First, I chucked a lenght of dowel into a power drill and wound a bunch of cord on that. it worked, kinda, but still unwound itself at times. Then I tried something with a flatter profile… I cut a butterfly-shaped wedge of thick cardboard and wound it around that. That worked pretty well but eventually with all the banging around the cardboard got bent and lost its rigidity (hey, it happens to us all, right?)… back to square one.
Surely I can’t be the only person with this desire to have an organized way of carrying around a buncha paracord, right? What does the free market come up with? Handiest I found was this - a simple piece of plastic with a built in razor cutter and a pocket to hold the cigarette lighter used for melting the ends of the cord. To keep things even more organized, I keep it in a snug ziploc bag…this way if it does start to unravel (which, so far, it hasn’t) it all stays in one place.
One other item I found interesting was this geegaw. Its a belt-mountable dispenser that lets you pull off a length of cord and cut it - all one handed. Its 50′ worth of cord, which is useful, though I prefer to have a lot more than just 50′ worth. Where it shines is that this is about the size of a pair of tape measures side-by-side, keeps it self free from snagging and tangles, is refillable, and is just generally pretty well thought out. If you don’t mind it being only 50′ this is a pretty nice one-stop-shopping solution.
I really can’t overemphasize the utility of paracord. It really is one of those products that is ‘only limited by your imagination’.. But my experience has been that there are a lot of times, even without the world coming to an end, where having this stuff is amazingly useful. I really think you’d be foolish not to make this stuff a ‘must have’ in your emergency gear or everyday carry bag.
As an aside, it is also worth mentioning that this type of paracord is also available in a variety of colors….ODG for those military and subtle needs, and blaze orange for the ‘needs to be visible’ applications. And pretty much every color in between.
BUT….make sure you’re getting the multiple-strand stuff. Not the cheapo Made In China ‘mil-type’ crap. Lowering your gear from the rooftop of a flooded WalMart into a waiting rowboat is no time to discover that saving $15 by buying the ‘almost as good’ product was a bad idea. Don’t cheap out on gear that might turn out to be very mission-critical someday.
And while we’re on the subject, for Crom’s sake, learn to tie some knots. Without getting into boffin country, there are an amazing amount of knots out there that have qualities that make them very much worth knowing. Grab five feet of paracord, go jump on YouTube, and learn some useful knots. Seriously.
The year is 1.9% over and I still haven’t bought any guns.
I have gone __7__ days without buying a gun this year.