Quote History Quoted:
I put two aluminum stays in mine.
Remove the stock frame sheet, sew two pieces of nylon strapping onto the sheet and slide two 1" wide aluminum straps bent to fit your back into the pouches.
Very comfortable, even with the stock belt you hardly even need to tighten the shoulder straps.
Even better, slide a load bearing belt like a prairie belt from HPG and its like a giant lumber pack. Shoulder straps are just for balance
And the Tara insert from HPG fits into the smaller zippered pocket perfectly. It is a loop field with cuts for pals webbing if you want to organize with mounted or tearaway pouches
View Quote
There are some mfrs that offer frame sheets with aluminum stays in conjunction with their packs, and some of these
stayed frame sheets can be adapted to other packs. IIRC SKD offers one, and perhaps ATS. Spec-Ops also offers a respectable stayed frame sheet for their packs, and all of these
might be adaptable to other packs as long as the outer perimeter of the modified frame sheet will fit tightly into the target frame's frame sheet pocket. It is quite likely that any and all of these stayed frame sheets will need to be trimmed to fit into a given pack, but maybe not.
For the most part, frame sheets with auxiliary aluminum stays are most useful in conjunction with packs that come equipped with an integrated load-bearing waist belt. In this instance, the stays (in conjunction with the frame sheet) help the pack to direct the weight of the pack onto the waist belt, and so take weight off the user's shoulders.
To my mind, there is no useful benefit in having aluminum stays integrated with a frame sheet when used on a pack without a load-bearing waist belt, such as the classic LBT 3-day pack. With the LBT 3-day pack, there is no load-bearing waist belt, and so there is no advantage in having aluminum stays on such packs.
What's a Load-Bearing waist belt? Many small packs have, at most, a belly-band that encircles the user's torso, and prevents the pack from swaying and flopping around much under strenuous activity.. Very useful, but a belly band does not carry any of the pack's weight. A load-bearing waist belt is built-in to the pack, and is intended to be worn on the user's hips so as to transfer most of the weight of the pack from the user's shoulders onto the user's waist.
Let's say one has a 50-pound pack; it's a PITA without a load-bearing waist belt. The same pack, with a load-bearing waist belt is a relative breeze to use.
Frame sheets with integrated aluminum stays come into their own when one considers packs larger than the LBT 3-day pack, and which have decent, adequately padded waist-belts that are load-bearing. As it happens, a majority of such packs either come with such a stayed frame sheet, or have such as an option. Witness Spec-Ops offerings, as well as others.