What About the Break In Test?

by Crazy Ivan

So last week I talked a tall game about how I was going to be testing out the various popular Myachi break-in techniques.  I acted like I was Adam Savage over here promising to throw down a Myth-Busters style scientific experiment to judge the effectiveness of all the different common ways of yummying up a Myachi.

And then 10 days went by and I never said another thing about it.  It's almost like I didn't want you to know which method worked.

The truth of the matter is even worse.  I actually haven't done the test at all yet.  When I wrote the blog last week I underestimated two things: How hard it would be to get enough identical Myachis to test and how intricate some of these break in methods are.

Animal pointed out to me that to do this properly, I would need several different types of fabric to test.  I would have to at least test something easy to break in (like a corduroy) and something difficult to break in (like a denim), but ideally I should do something in between as well (like a suede).  That sounded good, but the idea of acquiring 8 of each of three different types of sack was pretty daunting.  Keep in mind that there is a lot of difference between one corduroy and another so it's not like I just needed 8 corduroy sacks to test, I needed 8 Aztec Reds (or Phat Kat Greens or Finish Lines or whatever).

It wouldn't do me any good to use the new 5.0s because they're already so much more jammable than most sacks so that would prejudice my experiment as well.  What I needed was 8 of each of older sacks.  And, to make matters worse, they all had to be in mint condition because if any of them had been jammed with before they wouldn't be going into the experiment equally jammable.

That part took a lot longer than I thought, but eventually I (sort of) accomplished it.

But by then many people had pointed out errors in my test design as well.  As popular as it was, I wasn't going to be testing the "Dragon" method according to my first post on this.  I also wasn't going to be trying enough of the stuff in conjunction to test the interplay between one method and another.

So like a good Myth Buster, I went back and redesigned my protocols altogether.  To do so, I've had to radically change my schedule on it (I was supposed to be done the day before yesterday and I haven't even started), but now we're locked and loaded and ready to go.  I'll post an update (possibly with video) tomorrow once I get things going and have all test underway.

And I apologize for getting your hopes up and then dashing them, but look on the bright side... think of all the suspense I've built up now.