Fixing a Mission Workshop Sanction

I’m a big fan of Mission Workshop bags, but they are not perfect. (BTW, I’ve come to the conclusion after spending way too much money on way too many bags that The Perfect Bag does not exist.)

Lately I’ve been carrying around my MW Sanction, which I made a “modification” to a while ago, but just today realized I could fix even better.

It’s a well know design bug/feature of MW bags that the pockets go all the way to the bottom. This is very commonly commented on in reviews of their bags. This leads to everything collecting at the bottom of the bag, regardless of which pocket you put it in. The Sanction and Fitzroy definitely have this (mis)feature, but I’m not familiar with their other bags.

It turns out there is a rather simple “fix” to this (mis)feature:

This is a shot of the middle zippered pocket in my sanction, pulled out, with some Gear Aid Repair Tape applied. By pulling the pocket out, folding neatly, and then taping over it, I’ve effectively shortened the pocket. The tape holds very well. (I have not tried to remove it, so I don’t know how much damage that would cause. Consider this a one-way trip.) You just push the pocket back in, and the “problem” is solved.

Of course you get to decide exactly how deep/shallow you want this pocket to be when you do this.

So this morning, I realized that I could probably figure out a way to execute the same solution on the “secondary” pocket as well. The problem here is that this pocket is attached to the bottom of the bag, and cannot be easily pulled out to cleanly apply the tape.

Anyway, I managed to get it done:

With this modification, now my notebook does not disappear when I put it in, but sits at exactly the right height.

I will not attempt to explain in detail how I got this done. It was a challenge. It certainly is not as neat a job as with the first pocket I did.

My main worry with both of these was to make sure I covered the entire width of the pocket. I don’t like the idea of having things slip down into the lower area where I couldn’t get it out.

Since I’m here, I’ll throw this in as well.

This is a pretty basic hack of just attaching something to the velcro to reduce noise when opening the bag. The red one is this middle is achieving nothing, but is just being stored.