Lightweight, portable mac (Mac in a Sac)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Mac in a Sac
Date:	16/05/09 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice thin portable mac available in a range of sizes and colours

Disadvantages: Probably won't last forever

Having recently bought one of these macs for approx £20 from the local camping shop, I am a bit gutted to see them currently retailing for about a tenner on the Ebay ad with dooyoo.

But that's not the Mac-in-a-Sac's fault. I got it at the beginning of a day out when I was caught short by the sky suddenly turning seriously black when we'd no time to go back for my 'proper' rain coat. It was an impulse purchase, but is much appreciated for all that.

Mine is in a nice, uniform shade of lime green - the colour was a very attractive selling point for me. It doesn't have any of those superfluous shoulder-flashes or panels of different coloured materials you often find in kagoules, and I count that as definite plus. It has a zip front (but best treated as a pull-over-your head garment, as the bottom of the zipper is a little sticky), two side zip pockets and a hood which folds away into a neck flap / pouch which is fastened with velcro. That stumped me momentarily the first time I wore it and wanted to get the hood out in the rain, as I was looking for a zipper but this is actually a good design, as not incorporating a zipper makes the neck area more flexible and comfortable when you're wearing the coat. Because of the thin-ness of the nylon, the hood, when folded away isn't uncomfortably bulky, either - this being a problem I've found with other similar raincoats.

That the coat is so thin, lightweight and pack away-able is undoubtedly its best feature. Someone gave me a 'proper' Gortex raincoat once, and it's all windproof breathable fabric and double-lined bells-and-whistles-pockets and so on, but it looks, fits and carries like an outsize piece of tarpaulin, and the main reason I was sans proper attire the day I bought the Pac-a-Mac was that I couldn't face lugging my 'proper' coat about for any length of time if by chance it happened not to rain.

The fabric the Pac-a-Mac is made from doesn't seem to 'breathe' at all and mine, being quite new, still smells kind of weird when it's unpacked, but it's a not at all unpleasant, faintly chemical aroma, and I rather like that about it. And it's so portable - it weighs next to nothing. I hate lugging stuff about generally but have taken this on several walks - with and without another bag (it has two straps on the outside of the little pouch the mac folds in to that you can use to fit it round your wrist) and barely noticed it was there.

Yes, that light, thin nylon fabric it's made from is the best thing about it. I doubt it's going to last forever, or that it's going to be much extended use if I should very uncharacteristically decide to go for an extended 10 mile walk during, say, a monsoon, but as I want this to cope with short periods of hopefully only light rain and showery weather, and certainly don't intend to wear it 24/7, it's worked great for me so far and I think it's perfect for my intended purpose - which is as a back-up to keep in the car boot, or to take on my holidays, to guard against getting caught in the rain.

Something funny happened after I packed the Pac-a-Mac away today when I was trying to close up the little pouch around it, however. The carry-pouch closes with an elastic pull-tight tie that runs through a sort of an adjustable double-toggle arrangement which keeps it pulled tight. Now, the loop of elastic string that fastens the pouch isn't simply tied in a knot on the outside of the double-toggle as you might expect it would be. No, they've done something which I suspect is intended to be clever, but which works out as being a slight pain in the neck in practice. Intsead of just knotting the elastic together to tie off the loop, they've actually tried to stitch the ends of it together. Presumably they're trying to make the join in the elastic be as thin as possible, so that the joined area itself can feed / be passed through the holes in the double-toggle - whereas a simple knot would get stuck in the holes immediately.

This trick hasn't worked; on mine I saw that the stitched / joined area had pulled loose from the underlying elastic after about only 3 uses of the mac; I ended up with an annoying tangle of frayed black coating from round the elastic, plus a load of unravelled green stitching-thread clogging up the holes in the toggle instead. Happily this was easily fixed; there's enough elastic for you to feed it through and make a knot on the outside of the toggle - after you've done that you can get rid of the stitched join entirely. The thread-coated ends of the elastic may well fray themselves, eventually - which is presumably what the mac's makers were trying to avoid with their clever green stitching - but this is no great disater, and the closure works better knotted anyway.

Summary: Not a mac to last a thousand years, but a very good product nonetheless