Kifaru Bane with upgraded straps — Hill People Gear (HPG) harness
There's been lots of talk on upgrades to the Kifaru Bane shoulder straps. The Bane was designed as a lid that could be quickly detached to function as a stand alone stalking pack, though many of us like the idea of the Bane as a small pack for day use, as treestand pack, as hydration pack, etc.
My use case is squarely in the latter, using the Bane much more on its own than as a stalking pack for which it was originally designed. The built-in 1" Bane straps leave much to be desired for that use case of a stand alone pack.
There have been various upgrades others have mentioned and shared, including using Kifaru X-ray straps modified in various ways to route webbing, using webbing adapters/reducers, etc. I've also seen some folks use other 3rd party straps like Tethrd. These all look functional and achieve a higher level of comfort when the Bane is used on its own.
That stated, I still wanted to be able to have the Bane be quickly convertible to a lid and/or "docked" bag on my main Kifaru setups, allowing me to easily switch between stand-alone pack and lid/docked bag. I worried some of the other strap options may take a lot of time to convert, or possibly even require modifications to the Bane itself which could make it less useful for its original intent as a lid.
I opted to try the Hill People Gear shoulder harness to see if I could meet my requirements of 1) better straps when using the Bane on its own and 2) easily switching between stand-alone pack and use as a lid/docked bag. I feel I was able to accomplish this easily using the hardware that already comes with the Bane, the Kifaru Guide Lid Kit. I wanted to share how I initially set this up in case it's helpful to others.
The Bane comes with sewn in 1" straps through male autolock buckles at the top of the pack. Removing these straps through the male autolock buckles can be somewhere between finicky and a total PITA due to the fact they are doubled over and sewn at the end. So, instead of doing that each time as may be the case with several other alternate strap solutions, I simply attached split-bar female buckles from the Guide Lid Kit through the tabs on the back of the HPG harness. This way, the sewn-in 1" straps with male buckles on top of the Bane clip into the upper end of the HPG harness with the split bar females from the Guide Lid Kit. It's fully adjustable to meet the desired ride height of the Bane (in these photos, it's snugged up all the way). I cleaned up the excess webbing with some Velcro One Wrap.
For the bottom end of the HPG shoulder strap, I used the remaining part of the Guide Lid Kit by connecting K-clips with straps to the tabs of the HPG harness where the tension locks on the shoulder straps are sewn in. There's plenty of slack in those loops to get the K-clip on pretty easily.
From there, the Guide Lid Kit straps already run through autolock male buckles that simply click into the existing female buckles on the Bane (note: those female buckles are not slotted females...they are sewn in so they are always in place). Adjusting the length of this strap is just backwards from normal shoulder strap adjustment; length is adjusted on the Bane side, not at the bottom of the shoulder strap.
I didn't use any of the 4 straps that comes with with HPG harness, though another option would be to use 2 of them from the bottom of the HPG straps to the Bane. The easiest way to do this would be to remove the waist strap on the Bane and run the HPG straps, which have sewn in 3 bar sliders, through the common loops on the Bane. I tried to do this at first with the Kifaru waist strap installed, but there's really not enough room to run both sets of straps through the common loop.
I've only done this while at home base, so time in the field this fall will be most telling of function in real world scenarios. But, so far, I can quickly transition from stand alone Bane with the comfy HPG harness to using the Bane as lid/docked bag on my Kifaru pack setups. A couple click-outs of the 4 side release buckles (2 top, 2 bottom) remove the HPG harness from the Bane entirely. Detaching the 2 K-clips from the HPG straps and removing the 2 split bar female buckles from the HPG harness get both the Bane and HPG harness back to "stock." That hardware is all used to run the Bane as a lid or when docked to a bag anyway, and in some installs even less switching out may be required if utilizing hardware already installed on the Kifaru bag or to tab loops on the frame.