This one was a simple one. The canvas that these anoraks are made from is fairly stiff. However, with even a slight wind, it will collapse the material against your face, limiting visibility, and reducing the wind breaking efficiency of the hood itself. To limit this, most people add a wire stiffener to the outside rim of the hood. Any stiff wire can be used: hobby wire, gardening wire-I used a wire coat hanger, as its what I had on hand. The method is really very, very simple, and takes less than 2 minutes to accomplish.
First, identify the channel where the wire will pass through. With these, there is a hood tie located in the channel, so its dead simple:
The next step, you need to identify the seam where the cloth hood pulls are sewn into the channel, to prevent them from coming out accidentally. You will need to either partially, or fully, remove this seam, so you can pass the wire through:
Next, cut off the part of the hanger that is hooked, and where it wraps upon itself:
Next, straighten it out, by hand, and, what I did, is to put some tape on the end of it, to keep it from poking through the material:
Once the wire is straight, and the end is taped off, simply feed it through the opening for the hood pulls:
Now, all you need to do is feed it all the way through to the other side. You will notice that there is a little pocket of material below where the hood pulls come through. Get the end of the wire into that pocket, nice & snug. What I did, was, I didn't trim the wire until it was seated firmly in there. Then, I cut it to length, taped the other end off, and popped it into the hood seam, so that the other taped end sat in that pocket. This method worked very well-the most laborious and time consuming part was actually cutting the coat hanger down :). The finished product will have a nice, stiff brim, that will not close up on you:
And, that's all it takes! Very simple mod, easy to do, but makes a world of difference with the hood.
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