making my own maps for touring

[kahel]

Anticipation is the greatest joy.

As I'm planning a multi-day canoe trip with friends in May, I'm already preparing the right maps. This approach has proved very successful on my last tours and I'm going to introduce it as my "standard".



Sure - of course I also have one of these map bags ...

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... I had copied a "better scale" of the map as a section, printed it out on paper and then laminated.
The corresponding features of the map section as well - and then I have everything at a glance.
great.



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and here is a picture from last year.




regards
Michael

 

[Boatman53]

That is awesome Michael. Now to find a laminater.
Jim

 

[kahel]

there are a lot of them in the world wide web

https://www.amazon.de/s?k=laminator+machine

 

[Glenn MacGrady]

More of your DIY cleverness, kahel! I was unfamiliar with those machines in your photos, so I had to puzzle over them for a while. I assume one laminates plastic on the paper maps. Does the Multibind 320 machine just punch holes in the edges of the pages, or does it also help insert the plastic spiral binding? Novice no-nothing here.

 

[kahel]

In the first step, the binding machine punches the holes and in the second step you can place the sheets in the spread spiral binding
Then release the spiral binding and you're done.

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here you can have a closer look

 

[Glenn MacGrady]

Ah, the video was explanatory. Very clever machine.

 

[Tsuga8]

Nice work, kahel. One nice thing about laminated maps or papers is that you can mark them with sharpie, then take the sharpie off with rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer.

I started making my own digital maps for use in Avenza on my phone, but I still bring commercial laminated maps as well. I like paper better but that GPS locator overlay sure is nice when you can't quite find the portage. I also like using aerial maps on my phone- can see things like channels through swamps. Nice in combination with the paper topo maps.