 Can we make this usable? Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we're gonna talk about dyeing UCP gear in an effort to actually make it usable. I'm gonna start rolling in footage here almost immediately because I want to show you what this UCP camouflage pattern, and I put that in quotes, looks like with a variety of different camouflage tops so you can get a good understanding of kind of what the base is that we're looking at. If you're not familiar with UCP gear, it is absolutely terrible and blends with nothing. It's called a universal camouflage pattern. And anytime anyone says, oh, it universally blends with everything, of course it blends with nothing, and I don't know how many millions of dollars the government spent of your tax dollars making sure this pattern is completely worthless. So there's lots of surplus gear of this out there, and what we wanna look at is different ways to dye it and different color formulas to dye it with. So I have three different patterns here that I'm gonna be showing you, or three different color shades, I should say, that I'm gonna be showing you to help you understand what can be done with this and you can make your own decision of what looks better. The goal of this video is really to help you look at the different color shades that you can dye it and give you some ideas of things you could do. I will, of course, have a link in the description below. It's an affiliate link for the dye if you wanna go out and try this yourself. There's a couple things to note here. And the first is, these color shades, I almost say patterns, these color shades, I pulled right off the RIT dye website. That's where I got it, and I just picked some shades that I thought would work and then I tried them and that's where we're at. You can mix and match and make your own shade and make your own color formula. Some people have had success with just using a bottle of dark brown or kelly green. I tried just a bottle of kelly green in a previous video. Didn't really like how it turned out, it was a little bit too tropical for me and didn't have enough darker shades. So for this go around, I was trying some colors that were supposed to get some darker shades to it. The other thing I will say is as you look at these different camouflage colors or shades, the first one is a sandy and that one actually turned out just about perfect. It blends almost perfect when you put like an OD green pouch on it and looks really good. The other one will be a caramel spice and this one actually looks more brownish on camera than it does in real life. In real life, it almost looks a little bit yellowish but it does look really good and it does work. That particular pack when I started with it was very sun faded to begin with and that seems to have affected the dye color, the dye color because it was supposed to be a shade darker than the sandy color but as you'll see as I roll through this footage here, it's not actually a shade darker. It's actually a shade lighter and I think that has to do with the fact that the pack itself was sun faded when I started. And then the last color I'm gonna show you here and I haven't even dyed this yet when I'm recording this is called the olive drab. It's called the olive drab color on the RIT dye website and that one I expect to come out much darker so you'll be seeing the footage and I'll be seeing the footage for the first time when this airs and you can kind of make your own judgment. Again, the goal here is to look at this old UCP gear and say what can be done with this and the reason we would do that is because these three packs for example, I bought for like 75 bucks for all three of them. I mean they were around 25, $26 a piece when I bought them. I can throw a little dye in there and all of a sudden for under 50 bucks you can have an extremely functional pack that is an effective color and you can do this with lots of different UCP gear because there's a lot of it out there and most of it's pretty, what am I trying to say? Affordable, it's pretty affordable compared to other versions or brand new versions and even the used stuff like the used mag pouches or canteen pouches or packs in this case, even though these packs are pretty well used they still got a lot of life left in them and it's nice to be able to afford what would normally be brand new probably a $150, $200 pack and to be able to do that for 50 bucks or less with some, again, some work on your part. However, you can get a fully functional piece of kit. The other reason you might want to do it is just because it's fun. It's fun to experiment with different colors and come up with something that's pretty unique and pretty only your own and no one else can necessarily go out and just buy that, right? Cause you're gonna dye it and it's gonna be a, and especially if you come up with your own formula or you mix and match formulas or whatever it's gonna be something that's unique to you and that can just be fun, let's just be honest there's a little hobby level to it and if you're into that well then hey all much more of the better if you're not and you're like Dylan, I don't, so I really hope that what this video does is it gives you some different ideas and different thoughts about how you could reuse this old gear. I'm making these specifically as giveaway kit, right? I'm not planning on using these primarily for myself although that of course could happen. I'm primarily thinking of these as packs that I want to have on hand that are part of my giveaway kit which I made a video about that in my American Minuteman gear series so if you haven't seen that go ahead and check that out but that's primarily why I'm making these and why there's such a great idea to have a usable pack at an affordable price here and I think there's a lot of room to make something of value out of this old discarded otherwise worthless gear. So like I said I hope this video gets you thinking it gives you some ideas, it gives you some direction and it lets you get out there and make something really cool that's also effective. Do brave deeds and endure.