ziptrickhead
Newly Enlightened
These two items were provided by Going Gear (www.goinggear.com) to review and give away at FCW-6. I chose the small and the medium ones as two of my raffle prizes. They can be purchased for a few dollars online.
I believe that these are just baby bottles. Essentially when manufacturers make plastic soda or water bottles, they put these in a mold and heat them up so the plastic becomes soft. Then compressed air is blow into it so that the plastic expands into the shape of the mold. So while a regular plastic bottle is thin and can puncture easily, these bottles are nice and thick and durable.
The company that makes these tubes advertises a bunch of uses for them which I won't list, but basically you can use it to store anything that'll fit inside. The capacity ranges from 1 fl oz for the small one and 2.5 fl oz for the largest ones.
The packaging (or lack of packaging really) is very basic. You get the bottle with a tag with information about the product as well as some cord with a cord lock that's rolled up and stored inside the bottle. You can use the cord and cord lock as a neck lanyard looped through the hole on the cap.
Because they are essentially plastic bottles, the should be water tight which is great for storing small items that you wouldn't want to get wet. Personally I use the medium one for storing batteries and the small one for storing matches. 18650s just slide into the large tubes, with a little bit of wiggle room. So you can fit an 18650 and a 123a or just three 123a cells inside the medium tube. I managed to get around 8 strike anywhere matches inside the small one. I also topped off the top with a cotton ball for tinder as well as to prevent rattling. The small ones would be pretty great for vitamins or medicines that are too large to fit into the more traditional pill fobs. One thing you have to be careful about is that while the mouth of the tube is pretty wide, the actual inner diameter is small. Remember, the small can only hold 1 fl oz after all. I can't really even get my finger into the tighter region at the bottom half of the tube, so be careful of how much stuff you cram into it; you might find it difficult to get the contents back out if they can't just slide out. This isn't the case with the larger one as there isn't as much of a inner diameter transition with the large.
I also noticed that with the small one the cap doesn't screw down flush with the protruding lip on the outside of the bottle. From what I see in pictures though, that seems to be the case with all the small bottles. It doesn't affect the water resistance at all, but you can over tighten the cap and have the plastic of the cap bend a little.
One of THE biggest things I don't like about these tubes is how small the holes on the caps are. I prefer locking, load bearing carabiners myself. The hole just isn't large enough for me to be able to clip into. One of those keychain carabiners and maybe even the wire gate carabiners should work fine though.
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