In my garage, I have a large canvas bag filled with bungee cords, ratchet straps, and random lengths of rope and webbing. This Hydra head is not the ideal storage situation for these tools. Inevitably, rather than trying to untangle the strap I need from this Gordian knot, I buy new ones at the local hardware store. I tend to cheap out on these, and sooner or later (usually sooner), the buckles break or the fabric frays, and I toss them in the canvas bag with all the others. It’s a vicious cycle.
Given this fraught relationship I have with tie-downs, when Austere Manufacturing asked if they could send us a handful of their brightly colored cam buckles and straps to evaluate, I was a little nonplussed. How interesting could they be? Would they end up in the bottomless sack of doom with all the others?
I’ll preface this review by saying there is great worth in taking a simple thing—like a cam strap—and making it with the highest quality components and manufacturing processes possible. With this approach, a humble and disposable device will transform into an item that you’ll look forward to using every time you pick it up—and that you’ll want to hang onto for a long while.
Austere Manufacturing is an American company, and its small facility sits in the shadow of the Olympic range in northwestern Washington. They build their products essentially by hand, and the componentry is second to none. Austere designs its cam buckles with CNC-machined aluminum bodies and coats them in a range of cool colors.
They fit .75-inch webbing, and the cam mechanism operates on a stainless steel spring suspended by a titanium pin (you read that right). The upshot is that this relatively tiny, almost delicate buckle (just .98 inches wide x 1.14 inches long) is incredibly rigid and shockingly light, weighing only 8.2 grams. The webbing also comes in a variety of colors and features a smooth texture that slides easily through the buckle yet somehow tenaciously grips the teeth of the cam at the same time. Austere will also sell you buckles by themselves if you want to sew your own straps.
They’re tough, too. I put two of the Austere cam straps through an unlikely but severe use case. My Land Rover Defender is 30 years old, and occasionally, things fall apart (I know this may come as a surprise to many of you, but it’s true). On a recent adventure, the bracket that holds my airbox in place failed, leaving the filter housing dangling dangerously off the end of the turbocharger and within shredding distance of the drive belts. I secured the airbox with the Austere straps and cranked them down hard, putting a good chunk of my body weight into the pull. The buckles didn’t flex or deflect; the jaw just bit down hard on the webbing and stayed there.
Under the hood of an old Land Rover is a tough environment. The Austere cam straps held tight to my airbox for hundreds of miles.
The engine bay of a diesel Land Rover is an unforgiving place, with plenty of extreme heat, corrosive fluids, and intense vibration. At the end of the 800-mile journey, the Austere straps were still locked solidly in place—I never once had to retighten them, and they also survived sitting outside in -35 F temperatures in Montana, where I live. Try that with plastic buckles. They still look new, and these straps are likely in for an extended stay, too, as the OEM air filter bracket is no longer available.
Of course, the Austere cam straps are also perfect for much less intense applications, from lashing items to roof racks to bikepacking. I love the pastel-colored buckles, as they add a certain degree of whimsy to your loadout, and the orange, pink, green, and blue paint are highly visible. Austere also builds straps with a “tactical” palette for a more subtle look, including green, brown, and black. You can order lengths of 1.5 feet, 3 feet, or 4 feet. I struggled to find possible uses for the 1.5-foot strap, but my friend, an avid bikepacker, assured me that’s a perfect length for securing smaller items to handlebars, racks, and panniers.
The Austere Manufacturing cam straps have me thinking differently about a tool that I usually find to be expendable. I will put them to good use for a long time to come, and they’ll certainly avoid the fate of their compatriots in the cursed canvas bag.
$25 – $27| austeremanufacturing.com
