Ultralight camping seat
This post describes an ultralight DIY cloth camping seat that weighs ~50g. It uses three bush sticks for legs.
Introduction
I struggled to know what to call this sitting device. It is hardly a chair, possibly a stool, but that has other connotations. Then maybe a ‘thong’ but that too might attract the wrong viewers, but in desperation, it could just cover the bare essentials so as to speak if a cord was run around each corner. It certainly would not leave much for the imagination.
The seat was designed for ultralight backpacking when after a long day of walking with an overnight backpack on it is nice to give one’s legs a rest while camping. Its pack weight of 50g should not add significantly to the walker’s fatigue and may well produce a useful dividend the subsequent days of walking.
The ultralight camping seat
The camping seat is sewn together out of a scrap of found light polyester fabric in the shape of an equilateral triangle with a 300mm side length. There are two layers of the polyester sewn together with ganged rows of zigzag stitches to allow for stretching.. The leg pocket was made as a tube from a double layer of tough finely woven synthetic fabric. Each tube was 150mm long*60mm wide when laid flat. I sewed on the tube retaining cords to the tube seam. The cord can be used to tie the pocket down to the leg with a simple clove-hitch knot. The tube /pockets were sewn onto the corners of the seat, overlapping the corner by 50mm.
Regarding the bush pole legs, these can be ~500mm long and I cut a shallow groove around each pole at about 300mm from one end with my small universal camping knife. The legs are held tightly together with a twitch ring that is made of a strong cord. The twitch cord passes completely around each leg. Then it is tightened in the groves by twitching to stop the ring from slipping down the poles when the ultralight camping seat is in use.
[Add a video of twitching the legs together]
The ultralight camping seat works well in a small backpacking tent, especially when an ultralight tent stove is in use. It does not work well on sand and not at all in deep snow. There will be another ultralight post for these challenges.
Tim
