If you have ever wondered how one of the champs of outdoor camping gear is manufactured now is your chance to find out. Embedded below is a clip from the show, How It's Made demonstrating how Swiss Army Knives are assembled.

Some people are so dedicated to their Swiss Army Knives that some get tattooed with them.

There is a new tent company starting up called Heimplanet who recently unveiled their prototype tent design called The Cave. It's unique to other tents in that it doesn't require any poles as the rigid frame comes from 5 air chambers that connect together in a diamond grid shape.

The "Round Ground" design offers space for 2-3 persons to sleep and up to 6 persons to sit together.

According to the designers, it will take less then 1 minute to set-up which will be good when you are stuck in the rain. No word yet on tent specs including weight or pricing but keep your eye on heimplanet.com over the next year as they expect to release their first product in 2011.

Below is a quick promotional video they put together outlining its key features.

We all know that paddling/camping and shopping for gear go hand in hand and anybody who has visited their local camping store can testify that it can be intimidating at times. Never before have there been so many options and items to purchase. For example, my local camping store has 24 different types of headlamps for sale and that doesn’t include the 22 hand-held flashlights also available!

To help you out, I have made a list of my top 8 pieces of paddling camping gear for 2010. This list represents to me the best gear of it’s type for design, usefulness and durably in the field. It’s all gear that if I had to replace tomorrow I would most likely replace with the exact same thing.

Gone are the days of big chunky Personal Locator Beacons that just barely fit in your kayak hatch. ACR Electronics has just unveiled their newest Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) called ResQLink and its small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and only weighs 5.3 ounces. At that size it’s really something that you could carry with you at all times while on the water in your PFD.

ResQLink is still waiting FCC certification but ACR is expecting it to be on the market by Spring 2011. The price hasn’t been announced yet but look for it in the $250-300 range as they are trying to compete with the popular McMurdo FastFind PLB which is a similar price.

If you are interested, I would suggest you click over to the very good blog, Equipped to Survive which has a very detailed hands-on review of a pre-release version.

At $250, PLB’s are finally in the affordable range for adventures. I remember when I was a kid and had to walk to school in the rain uphill both ways, PLB’s were in the $1800-2000 range and were only used by serious folks paddling off to the North Pole.

Photo Credit: equipped.org

Jeff Allen is an aspiring BCU 5* coach and works for Sea Kayaking Cornwall. Over the past several years he has been designing and perfecting and new design for a rescue system particularly for sea kayaks.

It looks part tow line and part whitewater throw bag. It can be worn as a belt and it does triple duty as a tow system, a throw/rescue bag and a sea anchor.

Over the years I have seen many different homemade designs and I have got to say that this looks to be one of the best thought out systems I have seen in a long time. I agree with Dunks from Solent Sea Kayaking who wrote about it first. It isn’t pretty but it sure looks like it would function really well.

The video below can explain it much better than I can so I will let it do the talking.