Why I Don't Like Zippers

In my last post I just casually mentioned that I'm not a big fan of clamshell-design packs because they rely almost wholly on a zipper to hold the contents in the bag.  Zippers are mechanical devices that can, and will, fail.  I actually got a few off-blog comments about my statement, telling me I'm being overly alarmist about the whole issue.  Maybe so.

But then again, maybe not:

I grabbed this picture off of an eBay auction this morning.  This is a USMC ILBE 3-day assault pack.  These are extremely well made bags, produced by Arc'Teryx for the Marines and they fill the same general role as the MOLLE II Assault Pack I discussed earlier.

The seller in this auction has 10 in this condition he wants to get rid of, so it looks like this zipper failure is not an isolated incident.  He's very up front about the condition, so there are no deceptive auction practices at work here.

Statistically these kinds of failures are probably very low.  One thing is for certain, however - you'll never see a failure like this on a top loading bag like the ALICE pack.

Brian