Some good finds this week

[Ed Storey]

Canadian manufactured Lightweight (Assault) Respirator bags look like this example.

[Lang]

Ed,

The first bag and the one in your photo bear no resemblance. The terrible standard of workmanship on the first (I will allow a bit of leeway as the canvas is twice as heavy and stiff) compared to the excellent finish on the second would make you think they come from two different worlds.

The first, as you say may be Australian, and in that case suffers from the limited cloth available from local manufacturers and looks like tarpaulin material. The Canadians either had a wider range of cloth or had access to American supplies. It certainly looks like the quality American fine canvas found in most of their equipment.

The main criticism was the workmanship and finish not the material.

Those lift the dot fasteners were (and still are) by far the most common metal design in use in Australia and dominated the field until the advent of modern nylon, velcro and plastic systems. They have about 5 times the holding power of common press-studs. There was not a "ute" in Australia without those holding the tarp on until the elastic loops took over in the late 70's.

Still strange to see on British pattern equipment which suffered from the very poorly chosen square buckle system which could not be tensioned satisfactorily and was very fiddly to adjust.

[Private_collector]

That respirator bag may certainly be crap workmanship, but here it is 70 years later, still in usable condition. Probably made by very basic skilled workforce, and done 'under the pump' time wise. God forbid it should ever be needed again.

If you reckon that's lousy.................you should see the quality of panel fit on CMPs! No wonder they are full of stress cracks.

Guess dodgy workmanship is nothing new, just occurs for different reasons these days.

[Stew Robertson]

Tony if you had gotten twisted and bent like those old CMP you would have stress cracks too and as for the panel fits ,the more clearance, the less creaks and groans for the enemy to hear you comin