A Rustic Hat Rack

Threadless.com is a site where you can buy very cool T-shirts. One of the shirts, designed by Michael B. Myers Jr., reminded me of my trophy hat rack post from June.Here is someone modeling Michael's shirt.

Review of the Cap Pac hat rack

UPDATED I corrected a few typos that should have been corrected long ago. However, the intent of the original content has not been altered in any way. After rereading this post, I stand by my initial assessment. The Cap Pac is hard to use, unattractive, and will eventually break. I do not recommend buying this product. I regret not having an opportunity to follow up with the two comments that disagreed with my review. Unfortunately, they written anonymously and so we've lost the opportunity for any dialogue on the subject.

Jim Bridger
7/29/2009


Generally I'm a glass is half full, look for the silver lining kind of person, but I'm having trouble finding something good to say about the Cap Pac hat storage system. Here are three pictures from www.cappacintl.com.

The Cap Pac system is basically a vinyl bag that you stuff your hats into. Maybe stuff is too strong a term. As you can see in the pictures you're supposed to roll the clothe part of your cap around its bill and then place your rolled hat into the bag. In a previous baseball hat rack review, I mentioned that a potential downside of that particular product was that your caps *might* inadvertantly get dented. You intentionally deform your caps with the Cap Pac so stay away from this product if you want your caps to remain in pristine condition.

I also find the ease of use to be poor. There is no easy way to get to the cap that is at the bottom of the bag. If you want to wear that bottom cap you pretty much have to take the Cap Pac off of whatever wall or door you're using to store your hats, take all the hats out of the bag, find the one you want to wear, put all the hats back into the bag, and finally return the Cap Pac back to its normal hiding spot. That's a lot of work and pretty much a non-option if you're in a hurry.

One of the secondary goals of any hat rack is to display your hats in a visually pleasing manner which the Cap Pac doesn't even come close to doing. Inexplicably, there are no less than two ways of carrying your entire hat collection. You have the option of carrying your hats like a briefcase with the handles or using the shoulder strap while you presumably make your way to a rolled up hat convention. Both the handles and the shoulder strap are of a color and style that more or less exactly fail to please the eye.

Finally, the vinyl bag. Although this didn't happen during my review, my background in chemistry and plastics tells me that with normal use the initially flexible vinyl will eventually become brittle and start to crack and break. This process will be accelerated if you don't store this hat rack in a dark place.

Summary: if you like to roll your hats up and the thought of placing them in an easy to carry but hard to use plastic bag accentuated with ugly straps that will eventually break, this is the hat rack for you!