This was probably the most difficult and mysterious part of the pack construction for me. I didn’t get it perfect, so hopefully you can learn a few lessons from me. Regardless if you are doing an internal, external, or frame stays, the purpose is to add rigidity to the pack. But why is rigidity helpful? There’s already an excellent blog post that covers this (here), so I’m only going to gloss over the basics.
- Comfort against your back – Packs get loaded with odd-shaped gear that can dig into you uncomfortably. Frames can be a barrier and help prevent some of that.
- Prevents “barreling” – Overstuffed packs (bulky sleeping bags, etc.) can bow outward and prevent the pack from sitting flat against your body, throwing off your balance and making the load harder to carry.
- Easier packing – A rigid structure gives your gear something to pack against, making it simpler to organize and load the pack efficiently.
- Load transfer to your hips – A frame transfers weight to the hipbelt, which is essential once your pack exceeds roughly 12% of your body weight. You want that load on your legs, since they’re your strongest muscles, not your shoulders.
- Enables load lifters – Load lifters tilt the frame slightly forward to shift more weight onto your hips and off your shoulders. For this to work, they need to anchor to the top of the frame (ideally a horizontal anchor) rather than to the pack bag itself.
It goes without saying that the heavier the pack, the stronger and more strudy the frame needs to be in order to safely transfer the weight to the hipbelt.
History of Frames
Humans have never stopped inventing new ways to haul their stuff around. Every indigenous culture, it seems, came up with its own clever contraption for lugging loads from one place to another: tumplines, pack baskets, wooden frames lashed with sinew, you name it. The backpack as we know it today is really just the latest link in a very long chain.
- The ‘Bedroll’ or ‘Blanket-Roll’ from the Frontier to the Civil War – a look at how soldiers and frontiersmen rolled and slung their gear before purpose-built packs existed.
- A Potted History of the Backpack – a broader timeline tracing the backpack’s evolution into the modern era.
- Trager Manufacturing Company – the story of one of the companies that helped commercialize the wooden pack frame.
Frame Examples
Once you start looking, frame design turns out to be one of the most experimented-on parts of a pack and everyone seems to have their own take on materials, placement, and construction.
Stitchback Gear Metamorph pack comes with instructions on how to create a plastic frame sheet with aluminum frame stays. This is the type of frame I ended up making, more on that later.
Stitchback gear even went so far as to make a molded kydex frame sheet, which looks awesome, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort.
When it comes to frame stays, you can get really creative with where you place them and the type of materials you use. Fjällräven, for example, makes bags with wooden frame stays made out of birch, and they place the stays on the outside of the bag. I’m not sure what type of padding or rigidity the Fjällräven bag has to keep it from barrelling.
The Hancor Cobble Frame takes a hybrid approach: an inside pocket holds a folded bivy foam mat, while the outside of the bag has channels sized for two vertical and two horizontal frame stays.
The Alpine Luddites method keeps the foam pad sleeve and frame stays on the inside. There’s a brown zippered pocket for the foam padding, and wide webbing forms a channel for flat stays to slide into. This approach might be useful if you don’t want to sew through plastic. I also wish I’d known about this method before I made my pack, since having the straps on the inside would be a great improvement on my design.
Similar to the original Stitchback Gear design, this post from Tom Bihn shows a frame sheet with an entirely different shape. But again, having the webbing fold over and velcro down is a much needed improvement over my current frame.
This is the Ripstop By the Roll 40L MTN Flyer pack. A Redditor did some upgrades to the design, like adding an internal frame. They pulled the internal frame from another pack and made it work with their MYOG pattern.
This internal frame was for the Prickly Gorse Gear 50L pack. They 3D printed connectors for round aluminum tubes and tested the fit on cardboard first.
And internal frames don’t always have to be box shaped, as this Redditor shows.
Gossamer Gear has a tubular aluminum internal frame, but they also add a foam pocket on the outside for extra breathability and comfort.
This Redditor added an external aluminum frame to their pack. You’d still probably want a plastic sheet or some foam on the back so you don’t end up with a cooking pot jabbing you in the kidney for miles, but I love the look of that external frame.
And then, at the far end of the spectrum, you start finding the truly unique builds, external frames wrapped in traditional leatherwork, closer to a piece of craft than a piece of gear.
Making the Frame
As a reminder, my materials list can be found in a previous post.
How to Bend Aluminum
The first scary step was figuring out how to bend the aluminum stays. For my frame, I used one Multipurpose 6061 Aluminum bar, 1/8 inch thick and 1 inch wide. If I were planning to carry heavier loads, I definitely would have gone with two bars instead of one for extra stability, but for my purposes a single stay did the job.
I was genuinely intimidated by this step going in. I assumed I’d need some kind of special jig or bending tool, but it turned out I could do most of the bending using my gym bench and then eventually across my own thigh. Even on anticoagulants, I only ended up with a small bruise, nothing dramatic. Here’s a video showing how you might go about bending the stays.
If you’re struggling to see or understand how your own back curves, here’s a trick that helps a lot. Take a wad of aluminum foil and have someone help you mold it against your back until it holds the shape of your spine. Trace the curve on to paper since the aluminum foil doesn’t like to hold its shape. Then you can use the tracing as a general guide when you go to bend your flat aluminum bar. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process.
I definitely probably need to add more bend at the top to push the pack away from my head.
Cutting the Plastic Frame Sheet
Cutting the plastic frame sheet ended up being a lot less painful than I expected. All I needed was a brand new box cutter and a pair of protective gloves. Rather than trying to slice all the way through in one pass, I just scored the plastic as deep as I could manage. I started with four straight lines for the top, bottom, and two sides. Once the plastic was scored deep enough, I could bend and snap it clean. Yes, that’s a Legally Blonde joke!
For the rounded corners, I ditched the box cutter entirely and just used basic Amazon paper scissors. It was so much easier and gave a cleaner result than fighting the corners with a blade.
Sewing Webbing on the Plastic Frame Sheet
For this step I followed the method Stitchback Gear outlines. Looking back, I’d skip it entirely and go with something closer to the Alpine Luddites approach instead. Sewing the webbing stays into an internal pocket rather than directly onto the plastic seems like a much easier and more forgiving way to go.
To be clear, my Sailrite machine was able to punch through the 1/16 inch HDPE plastic sheet without issue. The real problem was my thread. It kept shredding on me constantly. I even tried Amann Outdoor Pro Polyester Bonded Thread Tex 90 with a heavy duty needle, and it still wasn’t enough. The edges of the plastic were basically acting like a razor blade, snagging and breaking the thread over and over. It was frustrating, to put it mildly.
Cleaning Up the Edges
It really helps to round off the edges of both your plastic and your aluminum stays before you go any further. I used a basic flat metal file on the aluminum and plain sandpaper on the plastic.
If you need to shorten an aluminum stay, know that it’s too thick for any kind of scissor to handle. Clamp it down securely and reach for a hacksaw instead. It takes some patience, but the hacksaw will get through it. Once it’s cut to length, go back over the new edge with your metal file to knock off any sharpness.
Inserting the Aluminum Stays
This was, hands down, the hardest part of the whole build. At some point I started to resemble one of the monkeys from the opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, just grunting and flailing. I cycled through a few different tactics, first carefully hammering the aluminum in from the top, then laying it on a hard surface, gripping the sides of the plastic sheet, and pushing down as hard as I possibly could. Eventually I got frustrated enough that I just started slamming the whole frame sheet down onto the table. Somehow, that actually worked, and I finally got the stay into the webbing channel.
Adding Foam
I also experimented with gluing the plastic frame sheet to a layer of foam. In the end I really didn’t like how it felt against my back, and it threw off how the pack sat, so I peeled the foam back off. My final pack just has the plastic frame sheet with the aluminum stays, no foam.
Testing Fit
At this point, you can check the fit of your hipbelt and frame. The bottom of the plastic sheet should be in line with the bottom of your hipbelt, roughly.
I made our bags in a different order, so we used our hip packs from last year, since I knew the height of the hip belts were roughly the same size.
Adjust as needed.
If testing the pattern, make sure you get aluminum stays long enough. I had to reorder everything for Ryan because I need to add length to his frame. You can test this out using cardboard and just buy extra long aluminum stays.
Personal Aside
August really got away from me. I had a lot to take care of for my parents this month, so between that and everything else, this post took longer to write than it should. On the bright side, I did pick up a couple more helpful pointers along the way that I wanted to pass on.
Trustee vs. Durable POA
First lesson: put things into the trust’s name whenever you can. There’s a certain weight and authority that comes along with a trust, almost like it carries the implicit backing of a lawyer, and banks and institutions tend to take that seriously.
Second lesson: just because you have durable POA for a person doesn’t mean you automatically have any authority over their trust. Those are two completely separate things, and you need a very clear, well written successor trustee process in place ahead of time. My parents, unfortunately, didn’t write theirs very well. Both of them were named as grantors and trustees, but the way it was set up, if either one of them died or was deemed incapacitated, the other one would automatically become the sole trustee. Don’t structure it this way if you can help it. That setup means all of the financial responsibility suddenly lands on one parent alone, right at the exact moment they’re also becoming a full time caregiver or grieving a spouse. Instead, make sure a successor trustee steps in and becomes an active co-trustee the moment one of the original trustees is no longer capable. Or even better, if you have a family that isn’t going to fight about it, consider naming someone else entirely as trustee, someone who isn’t already buried under aging, caregiving duties, and their own life falling apart around them.
Side note, you can actually adjust how someone gets deemed incapable right in the trust itself. In the state of Utah, being declared non compos mentis, essentially not of sound mind, normally requires two independent doctors to make that call. But when you’re writing the trust, you can specify something different, like allowing a single trustee to request an evaluation and determine on their own that the person is no longer able to make decisions regarding the trust. It’s worth knowing this is even an option, because families often don’t realize just how hard and emotionally loaded it can be to get someone formally labeled incapable, and that difficulty ends up making every other part of the process harder too.
I have to admit, I’m incredibly thankful for my family through all of this. I have two older brothers who are completely fine with me being the one in charge of everything, and my parents know that I’m not somehow trying to ruin their lives by taking charge of everything. My brothers both live in Indiana with their own families and kids to raise, so it makes sense that the day to day responsibility falls more on me. Ryan and I are here in Utah with our parents, and even though not having kids ourselves doesn’t automatically mean everything should be dumped on us, I knew my whole life that this responsibility was going to be mine.
Monarch Money App
One thing that’s helped us avoid any tension or fighting is staying completely open about everything, no secrets, no gatekeeping. I put all of my parents’ accounts into Monarch and gave both of my brothers access. It’s nice that you can share an account and they log in with their own credentials to see everything. That way they can see exactly what money is coming in, what’s going out, and where every dollar is being spent, in real time, without having to ask me for updates. I suspect a family with some trust issues, this one small step could make a huge impact. It’s taken so much of the potential for suspicion or miscommunication completely off the table.
Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
Third lesson: sit down with your parents and their financial advisor together, especially if they have retirement accounts like IRAs. Ryan and I met in person with his parents’ advisor at Edward Jones just to go over their portfolio, and I did the same thing with my own parents. It’s one of those things that feels awkward to bring up, but it’s worth pushing through the discomfort.
One thing my family hadn’t been doing since their early 70s was taking advantage of converting their traditional IRA into a Roth IRA by maxing out the 22% tax bracket each year. Here’s why that matters.
Starting at age 73, you’re required to start taking money out of your traditional IRA every year. This is called a required minimum distribution, or RMD. That withdrawal counts as regular income, so you pay taxes on it just like you would on a paycheck. If you don’t actually need that money to live on, you have the option to roll it over into a Roth IRA or another post-tax investment instead of just spending it.
A couple of problems tend to show up here. First, the percentage you’re required to withdraw goes up every year you get older. And in a good scenario, your traditional IRA is still growing at the same time, so your RMD keeps climbing from two directions at once, a bigger percentage of a bigger balance.
The issue, though, is what happens when one spouse dies. Once that happens, you can no longer file taxes as “married filing jointly,” and suddenly a couple that was comfortably sitting in the 15% or 22% bracket can get pushed into 32% or higher, just from filing as a single person on the same amount of income.
One way to soften that blow is to not just take the minimum RMD, but to intentionally withdraw more, enough to max out the 22% or 24% bracket while you’re still filing jointly. For 2026, that bracket tops out at $211,400 in taxable income for married couples filing jointly (roughly $243,600 in gross income once you factor in the standard deduction). Doing this now, while taxes are lower as a couple, can spare your surviving spouse from a painful tax jump later. It also helps anyone who eventually inherits the money after both parents pass.
That last part matters more than people realize. When an IRA passes to a non-spouse beneficiary, like an adult child, that person only has 10 years to withdraw all the money and pay taxes on it. If you and your spouse are already sitting in the 22% or 24% bracket from your own salaries, having to pull a large inherited IRA balance out within that 10 year window can push you into a much higher bracket than you’d ever want. This is definitely a “good” problem to have and I think taking advantage maxing out your tax bracket is more important for the widow than it is for future beneficiaries.
One misconception I had was thinking my dad only had limited years to withdraw his IRA money. That’s actually not the case at all. As long as he’s alive, he’ll just keep taking his RMDs like normal, and if my mom outlives him, that same IRA rolls over to her and she continues taking RMDs as the surviving spouse. The 10 year rule only kicks in for non-spouse beneficiaries, so it won’t apply until it eventually passes to me and my brothers. But even knowing that, if you’re fortunate enough to be in a position like mine, where you’ll likely receive an inheritance someday, it’s still important to have these financial conversations as a whole family, not just leave it to whoever happens to be managing things day to day. There’s a real weight that comes with understanding how to handle a lifetime of someone else’s investments and hard work, and I don’t want to be the one who screws it up.
At the end of the day, none of this is stuff any of us really want to think about. Talking taxes, trusts, and RMDs with your aging parents isn’t exactly a fun weekend activity. But every conversation we’ve had has made the road ahead a little less scary and a lot more manageable. The important thing is to have the conversations with lawyers, financial advisors, bank managers, and family now and not later.
After all that, I think a fun uplighting song is needed! Play this with headphones on, you won’t be disappointed.
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