Home Made Sleeping bag

[greg2935]

Just thought I'd share this with you.

I cant really afford a new sleeping bag so I decided to make a homemade version, I took a very cheap second hand sleeping bag (cost £7.55 inc postage) off ebay, bought a double duvet (£12) from Woolworths, carefully unstitched the bag and refilled it with cut up pieces of the duvet. Have had to modify it slightly as I found that parts of the bag were glued together. All told I tried the bag out on Dartmoor last weekend and it seems slightly too warm for me so far. Just thought the idea might interest some of you on here who are on a limited budget and need a way to increase the rating of your bag.

Greg

[tomtom]

Great idea Greg..

i always figured that sleeping bag patterns were to complicated to mod!

guess you proved me wrong, well done!! :biggthump

[maddave]

That's the spirit mate.....Adapt, Improvise, Overcome

Good stuff

[bombadil]

I have a quite lightweight and compact wool army blanket which I have stitched up and use as a liner. Not only does it upgrade the "rating", it's also much more cosy to sleep in than the original lining :biggthump

[jakunen]

Nice one mate!

As it looks like I'll be out of a job in two months time, these sort of posts are very inspiring.

Keep up the good work!:biggthump

[NickBristol]

Excellent idea to modify a cheap sleeping bag with a duvet :biggthump

I did a similar thing on a much smaller scale by stuffing extra duck down from an old pillow into one of my older RAB down jackets. It gained loads of extra insulation and only lost a small fraction of of its compressability.

Did your custom bag pack down ok? Did you use a compression stuff sack?

Nice one again!

[willie]

well done mayte pics would be nice :wink:

[greg2935]

To answer everyones questions

Compression suffered quite a lot, guess duvet isnt as compressable, its about 2x as thick (the loft) as the original and I think probably 10% larger when compressed.

Its a cheap sleeping bag (read: not very complicated internally here), it had a box construction so wasnt too difficult to pull apart, large parts were glued so I cut those off and replaced them with cloth.

The bag is also about 2x as heavy as before so quite a few disadvantages (size and weight).

I would be happy to give pics if I owned a digital camera!

Greg

[RAPPLEBY2000]

i made a down duvet/ half sleeping bag (ultralight design), it was murder!

feathers were floating artound the house weeks later! and i did the whole thing in a dome tent to reduce feather contamination!

i am in the process of making a hammock, next prodject an insulated liner for it! possibly going to use the foam from an old thermarest copy!

wish me luck!

good luck for your own attempts!

my advice is this, don't skimp on anything do the best you can and it will last longer! :biggthump well done mate!

prehaps we should have a kit making forum?

[greg2935]

I've seen feather duvets made, the trick to stopping feathers all over the house is to wet them! They turn into a heavy mash and are easy to then handle, note that stitching becomes harder because of the extra weight from the water. Good luck with the hammock.

Greg