Just finished my UQ. Hex Tarp in progress. What about TQ?

**MDSH** · 09-26-2012, 21:06

Looks great!

Mike

**TeraHz** · 09-27-2012, 10:31

Originally Posted by Detail Man

I'd encourage you to at least crunch the numbers for a down quilt. Downlite has a good price on 800 FP. You're going to have about the same $ in the shells, and about the same time in the making of it. Otherwise just finding a synthetic sleeping to use a as TQ in the mean time would be the cheapest option.

If I do good materials and down it is ~$50 for shell + ~$80 for down. If I get 2nds dwr nylon and a pillow with 500 fp down, it is as low as ~$20 shell + $40 down. Both should get me about 2.5" of loft, with the second one, hopefully not leaking down and being little under 2x the weight of the first one.

I guess $60 is not too bad for a down quilt. I might do that.

**TeraHz** · 10-11-2012, 23:38

So here it is. I managed to finish it on time for my night out on Saturday.
77"x46" of 1.1oz ripstop nylon

Baffles marked 5" apart with scotch tape (that was a LOT of tape! Had to go to the store to buy a couple of rolls).

NoSeUum 3" baffles cut up:

Used the tape as a guide to make a somewhat straight stitch

Rolling the 'done' side made it easier to feed it through the machine

And one side was done.

The netting kind of shrank the nylon, but not by much.

Stitching the second side of these baffles was a major PITA! Especially with all that fabric around.

Eventually, they were done. Later on I realized I made them a bit too tall. Should have been more like 1.5" tall after sewing to keep the quilt a bit more "stuffed", but not the end of the world.

The next part is the messiest. Stuffing the baffles with down. I used an ebay pillow as a source of down and I made this jig that sucks down and blows it into the baffles. The problem I had is my dryer wasn't powerful enough (it was supposed to be done with a vacuum cleaner) so it took 15 mins to do a single baffle

Eventually I just went to the bathroom, closed the door and stuffed the other 14 baffles by hand causing a huge mess, but at least I did them all in about an hour. Add one hour to clean, total of about 2 hours.

I ended with about 2-2.5" loft. Should be good to about 30F which is usually the coldest I've been in the woods at.

Cinched end with drawcord for a foot box.

And used 3 small strips of blue velcro (the really strong one) to close the bottom part of the quilt to overlap a bit with my underquilt.

All comes at 74"x44" @ 23.56oz

So there it is. I tried it on the balcony at 45F in just my underwear (no worries, I had the quilt around me as I went out

) and it was quite toasty, so I'm happy with it. I'm going to a local park on Saturday for a night out and I'l be bringing all my new gear (first time hammock night).