Hey all. I’m seriously considering buying a harness from childharness.ca, however security is really important to me (somehow knowing I can escape really takes the excitement away from wearing it) so I’m trying to figure out how escape proof it would be, and, if there’s a way I could make it more so.
It seems they have some buckles that require two hands to unlock, AND you can affix some Velcro based covers over the top of them, but I’m not sure whether someone determined enough could still work their way through this.
Secondly, and this is something I’ve done with other sets of reins, I’m wondering whether your hands could be secured somehow with webbing wrist straps. A few potential options come to mind:
1. Securing them behind your back. This particular harness is perfect for that as you have a large, strong O-ring to connect them to, however this also brings your hands close to the locking buckles which, ironically, may actually help you to undo them.
2. Securing them together at the front-middle of the harness. This would certainly fix the rear escape problem, however there’s no obvious place to attach the strap, beyond just wrapping something around the piece if webbing between the shoulder straps. This might work, but it’s far from ideal. I’d love it if an extra small o-ring or d-ring could be added at the front below the webbing, but I’m super unpractical at stuff like that.
3. The final option, which Reincheck used to also offer, is to strap your wrists to the side of the harness. This is probably my favourite approach as it’s super secure, but also very comfortable and natural feeling. The challenge though is how to attach the wrist webbing to the harness itself. Perhaps you could thread something through the size adjuster strap? I’m not sure how well that would work, but it might. Alternately, perhaps you could sew a small additional piece of webbing onto the side of the chest strap and loop a webbing cuff through it. This might restrict its rEd ability though, so you’d have to make sure you had that in order first.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a brain dump of mine. Welcome any thoughts you have!