I'm shopping for luggage and am confronted with "600 Denier nylon" and "1200 Denier polyester" and whatnot. So I discovered this rather good overview of backpack (and luggage) fabrics. (Enjoyable writing style, too.)
(This is aimed at a US audience, where we use "denier" to measure linear density of a fiber. It is the weight in grams of 9 kilometers of fiber. This is the closest Americans will ever get to the metric system. The rest of the world uses the "tex", which is the weight in grams of 1 kilometer of fiber.)
The Definitive Guide that You Never Wanted: Backpack Fabrics...what are the benefits and drawbacks of nylon and polyester? What do all these abbreviations stand for? How did I end up reading Wikipedia for the last 3 hours? What is the answer to the ultimate question of life?…