How to Re-Inforce a FLIMSY Shoe Bag to Carry Your Heavy RC Starter BOX (Including the Heavy 12volt Battery Inside It !)

Okay im back with more RC type-Modifications !

Well, thats not strictly true here... Because the simple fact is that if you need to ever reinforce a bag in order to carry heavily weighted items then these principals will come into right handiness - also the strong webbing i use had been carefully inspected before i bought it i had requested the storekeeper (Fran from the link of the webbing's shop owner, excellent customer service) to inquire about the maximum weight handling capacity of the webbing and the breaking strain is approx 190kg so whatever you put into your bags, if the total is what ive just mentioned and the bag would of course need to be heavily reinforced with this excellent webbing, then you could essentially carry that much weight!

I have an old aging sports bag that has been repaired so many times that no one in the house wants it anymore ! GREAT !
Absolutely perfect! So now all my RC Car Stuff including the 1/10th Scale Buggy, gets thrown into, when ive set up a day to go racing with a buddy or two!

Its only a medium sized sports bag so my 1/10th scale buggy 'JUST about' fits in it, with the back spoiler removed, the car sits nicely on all 4 tyres when its put in the bag 1st ! Naturally the car doesnt live in the bag bcoz i read somewhere that when storing Nitro RC Cars, that the weight should be taken off the wheels, cant remember why, but my car sits on my shelf and its underside aluminum plate sits on top of 2 blocks of wood so that the tyres are not touching the shelf...

Anyhoo, straying from the instructable now, lol... Basically EVERYTHING fits into my medium sized sports bag and almost every cubic inch inside the bag is being used by everything i could possibly need when outdoors racing my buggy around, spare batteryies, 2 types of fuel, tools, collection of different classes of oils including WD40, !, and other Paraphernalia needed for taking an RC Nirto powered Car/truggy/buggy out into the 'field'....

As every molecule inside the car was taken up, i also want to be able to take my car starter box with me and those RC nutters of you out there know full-well that the 12volt battery once installed in the stater box is extremely HEAVY and the fact that the starter box on its own is rather weighty itself, so i wanted to reinforce a bag suited to 'attaching' this bag to my medium and already-full-sports bag (which from now on is and will be referred-to as 'The Buggy Bag!')

So here's what i bought for the modifications, oh and some of the stuff i bought was in-bulk and so ive calculated how much all this has cost me according to only the stuff ive used bcoz if anyone of you lot fancy doing this yourselves, then you'll have an inventory of 'stuff' that WILL one day be called-on again to fix/modify other things in whatever you do !

Ingredients:                                                       £
Sports Shoe Bag                                           4.25
Webbing   (20 Meters)                                10.99    (Bulk) {just under 2 meters used so 10.99 ÷ 20 meters = 0.55, 0.55 * 2 = £1.10  !}
Side-Release Buckles(10)                          9.99    (Bulk) {2 Buckles used so 9.99÷10 = 0.99, 0.99 *2= £1.98 !}
Eyelet Pins                                                      0.66
Basic Sewing Set   Including String!          1.30
Velcro (aka hook & loop, stuff ! 1 meter)    8.99   (Bulk) (2 * 50mm Strips used) {so 8.99 ÷ 100cm = 0.0899 * 2 = £0.18 !}
Tailors Chalk                                                   1.25   (This can be used many of hundreds of times if taken care of...)

                                          Grand Total         £ 9.47 ! (This is the price of reinforcing a bag yourself other than buying a tailored "RC Gear Carrying Bag" which will probably have cost you well-over £100 !!!)

Tools Needed:
2 Metal Thimbles
Pair of small short needle nose pliers (to get the needle through the thicker material of the bags!)
Electrical tape

Also Note Briefly that this has all been done via Hand-Stitching.... I have had access to an industrial type sewing machine for many many years (Mum was a seemstress!) and although it would have been ultimately quicker for most of the stitching of this project, the Damn Thing Scares The CRAP outta ME !!! I mean, the damn this makes the ground tremble, So if the ground trembles at the sight of it, well i aint as tough as the ground so im not messing with the damn thing! (Big Guy scared of a sewing machine - um YES lol)

-WARNING-
FOR THE INTERESTS OF SAFETY THIS PART SHOULD ONLY BE DONE BY AN ADULT AND EVEN IF YOUR AN ADULT AND HAVE DOUBTS - THE FIND ANOTHER WAY OF MELTING THE WEBBING THAT DOESN'T USE A NAKED FLAME BUT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES AM I TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYTHING YOU DO ON YOUR OWN ACCORD IF NOT USING COMMON SENSE AND/OR WITHOUT USING APPROPRIATE CAUTION.
THIS PART REQUIRES SOME GENTLE MELTING OF THE WEBBING SO-GENTLE THAT YOU ONLY USE THE BLUE FLAME OF A LIGHTER AND RUN THE FLAME ACROSS THE FRESHLY CUT EDGES QUICK ENOUGH TO MELT THE PLASTIC BUT NOT TO SET IT ALIGHT - THATS WHY I SAY TO USE THE BLUE PART OF THE FLAME AND NOT THE YELLOW OR YOU WILL SET IT ON FIRE...

(honestly, i think i give myself a headache always writing these warnings...lol)

You know what, just have a fire extinguisher to hand if your feeling that your gonna burn the damn place down...

grab a lighter an carefully melt the webbing's freshly cut cuts so that it wont unravel, and make sure you do this to BOTH the cuts IMMEDIATELY otherwise your heavy duty and expensive webbing will start to unravel and become useless pretty quickly...

As the webbing is basically just very fine strands of plastic, polypropylene actually (and i just wrote the name down without checking the spelling, woo-hoo! lol), Yaa so when gently melting the Cut ends with the lighter, i only ran the BLUE part of the FLAME down the cut edges about 4/5 relatively quick passes so that the webbing didnt catch alight and the end result is having the freshly cut strands of the webbing melt into tiny little lumps along the edges of the fresh cuts....

okay, so now you've cut 2 lengths of webbing right !

Now cut about 6 inches of the Velcro (Hook & Loop stuff !) and separate the two bits of velcro...

The velcro that i left in the 'ingredients link' has a sticky side to it (wish i would have used it, would have been a LOT easier!) but i just had normal velcro without the peel & stick sticky bit....

Its a bit of a nightmare without the peel & stick addition to the velcro bcoz what you have to do before starting the stitching is to use a small number of the EYELET pins to "TACK" the velcro pieces into place using the eyelet pins but always be careful when handling the work-piece as there will be a good 5 or 6 pin-ends sticking out all over the place surrounding the velcro...

Also Please Specially Take Note of the 2nd pic of my hand below as i need to point out some things to make life a little easier for you folks !

So after you have sewn all 4 of the velcro pieces onto the two straps you will be now ready to sew-in the side-release buckles....

Now remember, i only had the tiny little cute looking side-release buckles but the ones in the 'Ingredients list' at the start of this instructable are the more rugged and heavy-duty ones that i should have used but i just didnt have the patience to wait till i had got the big ones delivered!

Basically what you want to do is to thread the one-inch piece of the front/top of the strap (The end of the strap with the "HOOK" piece of the velcro stitched onto) through the bottom part of the side-release buckles (the female part of the side-release buckle) then fold over a half of the one-inch end of the strap so that it goes through the side-release buckle then folds over onto itself so you can permanently sew the side-release buckle into the strap.

Cheack out the last 3 pictures below to see how i mean and with how ive sewn my tiny side-release buckles into my straps...

What i did here is cut a piece of webbing that goes round the entire wall of the sports-shoe-bag and then overlaps about 3 inches, 'Tack it' with the eyelet pins all round the shoe bag and then start the stitching!


To make sure i had adequate reinforcing stitching, i did 3 lines of stitching, a row on the top, middle and bottom of the outter walls of the bag, and tripple-stitched each line, check out the last pic below to see what the heck im on about !

Last Section !!!!

Just hang on in there !

If you've reached this part, there isnt much to do now !!!

Almost time to play, lol

And thats all folks !!! lol

Hope you will find this very useful not only for creating a reinforced RC StarterBox Bag but for general reinforcement methods of making your bags carry alot of very very heavy items in whatever bags you intend to modify !

The Breaking strain on these webbing straps is proven to upto 190KG so these will last you a lifetime naturally when taken care of !!!!

Happy modifying and all constructive criticism's are welcomed !