Trapezing Jacket

Waterproof jackets are rarely effective for sailors who trapeze. They must be worn inside of your harness, which scrapes off DWR finishes and dramatically increases the local water pressure beneath the harness. Both cause water to soak into nearly any Waterproof/Breathable fabric.

While getting splashed a bit isn’t an issue, soaked-through fabric is much worse at blocking cold wind or venting excess heat

I’m working on creating a jacket to be worn outside of your harness, with a pass-through to allow the trap hook to protrude safely

Materials with higher levels of water resistance are intrinsically less breathable. Mechanical venting with significant fabric overlap should allow air to vent out and can be located to reduce water ingress during normal sailing use

( In-Progress as of march 2025 : Aiming for completion mid-april 2025 )

Mounting System : Garmin InReach Mini

Finding Problems:

Dangly things on your pack are awful while you’re hiking or skiing. Sure, in the best circumstances they’re benign, but once fatigue or hanger set in, they’re a sure-fire source of frustration. Candidly, there are a lot of printable solutions to this already, but I only have an SLA printer and the majority of solutions are bulky, ugly, or fragile for resin printing. Lets make something that plays to our material strengths.

A simple 3D printed in-and-up release mount should be super good enough to attach the device to the 1” webbing of my straps. The form is driven heavily by the strength of resin prints: the bracket needs to be a bit beefier with limited overhangs for the mounting flange to prevent cracking. This allowed for some deep chamfers as a quiet nod back to the Garmin device, and gave me just enough room for M2 bolts and threaded inserts to semi-permanently lock the pieces to the straps. The body was then dyed black. Revision 2 added a channel at the bottom for use with Anchor Link - style attachments

Springs are hard to 3D print reliably, but moulds for heat-forming plastic are easy to print!
I took a Dunkin gift card, laser cut the profile and mounting holes, and heat-moulded it into the spring profile I needed for this quick mock-up.

Impromptu User Testing:

By chance, a coworker is hiking across Portugal this month and asked to borrow my InReach!
As of 3/25/25 the device and mounting system are with her, collecting some much-anticipated feedback from the field.