Prune’mups

I find pruners to be a really handy tool to have out in the bush. For gathering up fire wood (which for me is invariably just dry branches from the bottom of trees), for helping clear away some foliage for setting up a hammock, for clearing a path through some really gnarly terrain when bushwhacking, or when foraging for wild food, I find them an indispensable tool. I’ve even been up to my waist in water when exploring up creeks on canoe trips, clearing obstructions out of the way with them.

Carrying them in a pocket doesn’t work, having to take off a pack every time you need them gets very long in the tooth after a while. The best solution I’ve found is to have them accessible in a pouch.

I used the Felco #8 shears for a long time. While absolutely superb pruning shears, the Leatherman Vista pruners were more compact and offered several tools in addition to the pruning shears for the same weight. I like the saw on it in particular. If I forego taking along the Bahco Laplander, this little saw is a passable substitute for most minor cutting tasks. I don’t at this point in my life have much use for the choke tube tool, I haven’t had cause to use the awl (although it is a pretty wicked looking example of one),  I would likely only use the knife if I lost the much better one I was carrying elsewhere. My only real gripe about it is the lack of a lanyard hole. I consider this to be a serious design flaw. Any outdoor tool should have a means of attaching a lanyard to it. What I may do is sacrifice the decent, but I-can-live-without-it Phillips screwdriver and grind it down, drill a hole through it and attach a lanyard that way.

This is the pouch I made for it.

Like the Saw’mups, this is also a design that utilizes a length of webbing to form both the back of the pouch and the flap. The body itself is made from 1000D Cordura. And like the Saw’mups it utilizes a surface mount side release buckle for the closure.

The webbing is a double length folded over, which allows the mounting hardware of the surface mount buckle to be hidden away.

The edge tape along the opening protects a high wear area.

There is a drain hole on the bottom to allow water to drain out, but I extended the webbing from the buckle to cover it to try and prevent all sorts of crud from working its way into the pouch through there.

Oh yes, and this whole thing was sewn by hand on the daily train commute.

The back showing the PALS webbing. While this tool is often carried alone, the idea was for it to be mated with the Saw’mups.

Nothing really innovative about either this pouch or the Saw’mups, but they were fun to make, use some techniques I haven’t used before, and are a solid way to carry these two tools on my adventures.