I started building a Skeena back in April 2020 and finished it in June for this trip to the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana in August.
Here it is next to a few Alpacka Classics.
Some thoughts on the build –
It definitely took longer than anticipated to make, I was probably close to 60 hours on it. I do think one factor was the iron size and this being my first time doing anything like this. Due to covid and wait times, I didn’t have time to get a leather iron from aliexpress. If I were to make another one of these I would get the leather iron in addition to the larger Hangar iron I used.
I went with no top up valve and just made a tube for the Boston valve, a tip I saw on here somewhere. It worked great.
Building it took more space than anticipated
The tips were very hard to seal as I couldn’t find a bowl with the right form, would potentially try to make a wooden form for the next one. Very glad I had the zipper though to be able to get in there.
Seat took a long time, but I think that was due to it being the first thing I did and was very meticulous in creating the reinforcement strips and probably didn’t really need to be.
I only had a couple small leaks when I finished and that was due to me accidentally getting the iron too close a couple times and touching the tip to it.
Here is a pretty extensive album of the build process that I documented along the way!