YompNotes Feature: Personal Survival Kit

Neil from YompNotes got in touch to share one of his recent posts where he breaks down how to design a Personal Survival Kit you can actually use.

Neil:

What is a Personal Survival Kit?
As I understand it, the Personal Survival Kit was developed as we know it today, in World War 2 by air crews, military personnel and SFs for when separated from their main kit. Or in the case of the air crew when they get separated from there airplane.

As a boy and finding out about the Personal Survival Kit as a concept for the first time, my imagination was pricked and I had to make one for myself.

FULL SIZE IS GOOD
Bases around a traditional 2oz tobacco tin, my friends and I would spend many happy hours, sat on the bedroom floor, packing and unpacking our survival tins, in an unspoken competition to see how much tiny, tiny, miniature, quite useless kit we could squeeze into a tin of 5” x 4” x 1”!

Quite quickly I came to 3 conclusions:

1. Miniature kit was next to useless when I actually try to use it
2. Why did everything have to be packed in the tin?
3. Carrying the kit in a pouch might be a good idea

I never acted on the suspicion that a full sized kit might be the way to go, somehow I thought it was cheating so never tried the idea. Until about 6 years ago (2012) when I thought it was time for a survival kit upgrade. Full sized was how I was going to do it and as time has passed I think of the kit as less of a survival kit, in that it’s only for the purpose of survival, I see it as a useful kit with easily accessible items that are just as likely to be used at a family picnic as they are after the apocalypse.

Editor: Nothing helps our pack choices more than learning from others, so if you have a great loadout to share click the button below to get started…