[pct-l] Homemade down sleeping bag/quilt--and now water!

[MedusaJ at aol.com (MedusaJ@aol.com)]

This is a great idea!  We had a similar idea, mainly to pirate from our 
existing down jackets, or to buy down comforters from a department store, where 
they were on sale for $80, but the Goodwill thing had not occurred to me.  Is the 
quality of down high enough?  Or do you know yet?  I mean, I'm sure two 
pounds of Goodwill down won't equal two pounds of $180 thru-hiker.com down, but 
does it work to keep you warm?  Let us know how it goes.

Second question for everyone:  we know that vast amounts of water are needed 
for SoCal (16 pounds--wow!), but what kind of water receptacles do we need to 
carry?  I have a two-liter platypus and County carried two two-liter gatorade 
bottles, so we both had two-liter capacity on the AT, and towards the end we 
rarely carried more than one, having trained ourselves to camel.  Adjusting for 
the cameling factor, how big of a reservoir do we need for the PCT?

Thanks...
Marzipan


In a message dated 2/2/2005 12:53:08 PM Eastern Standard Time, pct-l-request@
mailman.backcountry.net writes:


2.   Any good online sources for down?  (We've found a couple through web  
> 
> searches, but they're pretty expensive.
> 
> 
> 
> I have managed to accumulate an absolutely obscene amount of down ( gosh, I  
> 
> kinda went wild...maybe 10 pounds before I finally admitted that I had a  
> problem, and needed to turn to my higher power ) by going to the local as-is 
>  
> department of the Goodwill and picking  up discarded jackets and  
> sleepingbags.  
> And when you sew a good trick is to wet the down, otherwise  it will 
> get...everywhere, absolutely everywhere...let your mind wonder  
> here..yup..it gets there 
> too.
> 
> My current project is a down quilt using thermolite (warm when  wet) to trap 
> 
> the down and covering it all with a breathable waterproof  material from the 
> 
> local fabric store (It's not Goretex...I forget the name just  now.)  I'll 
> let 
> you know how it all turns out.
> 
>