Build Quality

It's easy to tell when something has been made with an eye to quality. If you ride my Schwinn it feels like a million bucks, my old Centurion despite being a low end model was made with the fit of a thousand dollar Atlantis. It seems that now build quality is something only for niche markets. It's all about producing as much as you can as cheaply as possible.

There's a reason build quality is on my mind. This morning as I loaded my pack for a hike one of the straps broke. After almost 20 years and thousands of miles my Jansport Nepali failed. There's nothing spectacular about the pack but it does the job it was designed for and it does it well. It can carry enough supplies for a month in the woods and it does so without complaining. It's an external frame, I know most everyone prefers internal frame packs but I'm old fashioned and I like the ventilation an external frame provides. Made before the china boom, the old Jansport was made in the US. So tomorrow I'll call Jansport and keep my fingers crossed that they have replacement straps, if that fails I'll probably try to rig a homemade solution. Old packs are like old bikes, it's hard to say goodbye.