do-it-yourself

Awhile back I mentioned that I want to start making sculptures that would avoid some of the storage, weight, and environmental problems of my prior work in concrete. Well, despite the fact that I still have some new ideas that will be big, heavy, and made of concrete, I have started a new project that will re-use old materials and be very lightweight. I'm not ready to divulge the content of the project, but it involves fusing plastic bags together to form thick, durable sheets of plastic, similar to Tyvek, which can be used like a fabric to construct forms.

After spending some time experimenting with various techniques of fusing the bags, I decided that I should try to actually make something:
This is a waterproof liner (left) for my cotton duck army surplus bag (right). Cotton duck is virtually waterproof on its own, but if it really gets soaked, water will make it's way through the canvas and this liner should protect the contents from getting wet. It fits perfectly:
Besides being good practice for my upcoming sculpture, this should be useful for my bike camping trip this weekend. The army surplus bag is another example of DIY engineering. My bicycle is set up with racks for mounting panniers so that I can carry stuff. I bought 2 of those army surplus bags and modified them so that they would work with my bicycle racks.

First I sewed a strip of webbing (cannibalized from the excessively long straps on my backpack) on the back of each bag so that I could attach bungee cords to the bag (left pic below). I bent a wire coat hanger into a hook on the midpoint of each bungee cord so that I could attach the bags to the rack. The hooks on the ends of the bungee cords are hooked onto the buckles that were conveniently already on the bags (right pic).
Actually, those buckles are really convenient, because they are for backpack straps. I can take the bag off my bike, remove the bungee cord, and wear it as a backpack. The other bag can be worn as a shoulder bag. Here's a picture of the bags set up for shoulder and back use:
After getting the bags attached to the rack, I needed to come up with a solution to prevent the bags from bending backwards into the spokes and potentially locking up the front wheel, which would be very bad. I found a bumper on the side of the road from a car wreck and cut it into plastic strips, which I bolted to the interior of each bag to stabilize the back side (see pic below...note the grommets on the bottom corners to allow for water drainage in case the bag gets flooded):
That's it for all of the functional modifications. The only other thing I did was to give each bag some character. I sewed on a bunch of old patches I acquired by trading with other kids back when I was a Boy Scout. I think it looks pretty good: