Vacuum Sealing Mylar Bags... The Easy Way!

hey everybody backpack hack here coming at you with another trail tip and I'm just vac sealing some stuff for long-term storage and I've been asked how I vac seal standard ordinary mylar bags the mylar bags I buy are just flat on both sides and a lot of people will try to vacuum seal one of these and the problem is is these things are absolutely flat when you put them into the vacuum sealer it can't draw air between these two flat surfaces they're too close together and they basically seal up and the machine can't pull air out of the bag now a lot of people will put things into a mylar bag and then put it inside a standard vac sealed bag I think that's kind of wasteful because there is a way that most ordinary vac sealers can seal one of these mylar bags now they do make mylar bags that are specially designed for vacuum sealers and what makes them special is when you look at a standard FoodSaver bag it will be flat on one side and will have a texture on the other and that texture allows a space between the two layers there's ribs kind of like the corrugations and cardboard that you see in like a moving box or something it allows a space to be made between the two sheets and then when you seal it it just melts it all together they do make mylar bags that have that feature that are designed for vacuum sealers they also make some vacuum sealers that have a special attachment or built specifically for doing mylar bags built into them but those kind of get expensive my method is to simply use parts of this bag to seal one of these and if you look close I've got a couple tabs little pieces of plastic and that is actually these little pieces that I have cut out of one of these so I'll bring the camera here and I'll show you exactly what I mean but usually what happens is when I seal something up you've got this edge here this piece between the seal and the end the bag you can just cut that off and now you've got my phone just let me know Noah had a message and cut off this ribbed portion and throw this away now you can cut this into two or three pieces and use them for this so I'm gonna bring the camera around here I'm going to show you exactly how I do that the way a vacuum-sealed bag works is if you look close there is one side that is nice and flat and the other side has this ribbed texture and again that rib is what allows these little channels to be formed between the two layers so air can be sucked out by the machine now a standard mylar bag that I use is just flat on both sides and doesn't have those channels like I said although they make mylar bags that have this feature built into them I don't buy them because I've come up with a method that I can use to seal these mylar bags and it uses parts of this bag what you really need is a little bit of this ribbed side just like this and the principle is is you put that into the bag between the two layers of the mylar and have a stick out just a little bit and then you can put it in the machine and you make sure that you have enough length to get past your seal so it can use the channels that are in that little piece of the plastic to go through and draw the air out now my method uses two of these I will put one in each corner and the reason I put them in the corners is so when this bag has whatever I'm going to seal in it I can adjust them like this and then I can pinch them with my thumb and forefinger and not only hold them in place but that allows me to get this up into the sealer and get it all dressed up before I close the lid and then the air can be drawn out through these two areas now where do I get these well easy you can take a pair of scissors and just cut up standard roll or prefabricated pieces when I vacuum seal something in here I may have a strip this long or this wide above the seal so I'll just take a pair of scissors and cut that out and I will end up with something like this sometimes I will open up a bag that has had something sealed in it and it's relatively clean so I can just cut this complete side off with a pair of scissors wash it up let it dry and then I've got a perfectly good source for a lot of these little pieces of this vaccine so either way you do it all you need to do is just cut out pieces of this ribbed side the flat side you just throw away and you end up making a bunch of these little strips just like just like that that's all you need is just little strips and like I said you can do that with a whole bag or a piece of the roll or the ends that you cut off of bat bags that you have sealed in the past so I'm going to go ahead and pause the video here for a second and get this package ready to go I'm back stealing some powdered milk for today so I'm going to go ahead and get this all prepared because you don't need to see that and I'll show you exactly how I do this okay so now I've got my powdered milk in there with an oxygen absorber and now I'm going to take my two little pieces of the plastic bag and this takes some dexterity to get used to doing but you need to put them in between the two layers and sometimes they curl up so I take a pair of scissors and uncurl them like you're going to curl a ribbon to straighten them out because for some reason that they like to curl up I don't know the physics behind that nor do I care but this is the solution and it takes like I say it takes a little bit of dexterity but the reason that's the reason I put them here in the corners is once I get them in place I have the ability to not only hold them in place so they don't slide in or slide out as well as dress my package up a little bit to make it a little bit better for sealing and that allows me to get right up in here and place this into the sealer and keep those things in place they don't have to stick out too far they just have to stick out a little bit you don't want them stick out so far that they come up over the seal here because it's going to try to draw air from outside the seal too so you want to make sure that the ends are up here in the vacuum changer chamber and then and you need a vacuum seal that can have separate vacuum and seal functions if I just hit the start it won't draw all the air out because this takes a little bit longer because it doesn't have this whole length to draw air through it only draw air through the ends here so I'm going to go ahead and hit the vacuum button here and it's going to get a little noisy and I'll show you how this looks you can see that as drawing the area before it gets too far along I'm going to dress this package up to make it store a little bit better but you can see that it's making that regular brick shape that you're used to good and tight and once I'm pretty sure that it's got all the air out I go ahead and hit the seal button and there we have a seal and as always I seal twice because I'm doing this for a long-term storage and there you have it a vaccine package using a standard mylar bag so this is backpack hat coming at you with this trail tip on how to seal standard mylar bags using bits and pieces of leftover plastic vac seal bags be safe out there I'll see you out on the trail or in this case on the other side of hits the fan

Channel: Back Pack Hack

Views: 133,815

Rating: 4.8526702 out of 5

Keywords: backpack, backpacking, hunt, tent, hunting, fish, fishing, angling, angler, hunter, fisher, backpacker, camper, hike, hiking, camp, camping, trek, trekking, outdoor, outdoors, trail, tip, tips, tricks, ideas, hacks, trick, idea, hack, backcountry, back country, wild, wilderness, SHTF, EOTWAWKI, prepper, youtubebackpackhack, backpackhackyoutube, vac, vacuum, vaccum, vaccuum, seal, sealer, food, saver, long, term, storage, store, mylar, easy, method

Id: fCgsbiTdnDA

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2016