Terra Nova Quasar Lightweight Backpacks – Made of Sails and are Light on Your Wallet
Whenever you start talking about lugging gear across fields and up and down mountains and hills there’s two things you’ll be looking at: A decent rucksack and the lightest stuff to pack. The thing is, if the backpack is large enough for your equipment, chances are that the rucksack itself will be quite weighty unless you start looking at the very expensive ‘specialist’ tackle. The new Quasar line from UK company, Terra Nova Equipment, is both strong and light thanks to using yacht sail material.
Unless you’re *very* serious about your hiking and other outdoor pursuits you wont want to be forking out £500+ for a backpack – Me, I only tend to use a backpack to get me, my booze and a tent across a festival site. My current rucksack works and is large enough at 65L for all the stuff I need (including quite a lot of alcohol) to get me through a few nights of festivaling but it does weigh a ton – even when empty!
Terra Nova’s ‘Ultra fabric’ is a polyethylene material that provides superior strength at a faction of the weight of conventional materials like nylon. This material will be reinforced with Cordura fabric and stitched together with Dyneema thread, which is rated stronger than steel. Not only that – these look totally space-age 🙂
The Quasar packs will be available in 30, 45, and 55-litre sizes and weigh between a piffling 14 and 21 ounces before being loaded with spare batteries, chargers, booze and sausage rolls.
A large part of the weight saving comes from their sack design and the fact that they don’t have any sort of frame. You do get a sheet of foam for support and the 55-lite eversion comes with a single alloy strut for added support, but that’s it. There’s virtually nothing besides what you stuff in them to slow you down.
Before the more knowledgeable of you out there write in to tell me about companies such as the USA’s CiloGear who also use similar tech in their backpacks – the main difference beteween then and the Quasar range is the price. You go and buy a 45L rucksack from CiloGear you can wave off $750 (£480ish) for the priviledge.
You can buy a Terra Nova Ultra 20, for example and smile whilst parting with £120 direct from Terra Nova or £99 from here right now. The new Quasar range will be shown off at shows early next year and I, for one, am looking forward to checking them out.
