mangochutney

Getting a Kydex frame sheet into a Goruck GR0 frame sheet pocket

Yesterday I began the process of upgrading my trusty Goruck GR0 with a 3.2 mm (0.126 in) Kydex frame sheet to stiffen it up. I used the immensely helpful instructions written up by Ryan Burns on ruck.beer.

The easy part was cutting and sanding it to size. The hard part—as the instructions suggested—would be getting it into the frame sheet pocket.

Black and white image of an all-black Goruck backpack laying face down on a carpeted floor. Most of the backside of the pack is obscured by a white, thin frame sheet (a piece of plastic meant to stiffen the backpack and make it more stable and rigid) and a dark grey frame sheet made out of a different material on top of it. The frame sheets are mostly rectangular but have trapezoidal tapers at the bottom.

I tried keeping bending the frame sheet and putting it in but the material is too tough (or I’m too weak). Then I had the idea to use tension straps to bend the (cold!) sheet into a u-shape to slide it in.
I placed two robust but slick tension strap at two positions along the frame sheet and standing my foot in the middle of the sheet then slowly and carefully tensioning the straps. The result looked like this:

Dark grey Kydex frame shee laying on a carpet bent into a light u-shape using two tension straps placed and tightened along the length of the frame sheet. The strap buckles are roughly in the middle (width-wise) of the sheet, placed almost directly over the lowers part of the u.

Dark grey Kydex frame sheet shot top down standing on the bottom corner on a carpet to illustrate how two tension straps were used to bend the plastic material into a slight u-shape.

With the plastic sheet in this shape, I started lowering it into the frame sheet pocket and slowly and steadily moving the lower strap up the length of the frame sheet as I was pushing the frame sheet down into the slit.
Closing the velcro flap of the frame sheet pocket ended up being very easy work once the frame sheet was in.

A couple of notes:

I cut the Kydex to the exact size of the original frame sheet.
Make sure that the edges of the frame sheet are filed down/sanded properly smooth to remove the risk of damaging (to the point of cutting and tearing) the straps or the material of the backpack.
When lowering the frame sheet into the pocket, I’d suggest doing this little by little and moving up the straps correspondingly to prevent undue stress to the fabric of the frame sheet pocket.