First broken part...

Well the T3 has finally broken. It's not serious. The piece that sticks up in the back to keep my brief from falling off the handle (which I call the "balancing bar") no longer latches down. The problem with this is twofold.

1) It flops open when in the overheads. Flight attendants fuss with it trying to make it stay up so they can close the compartment.
2) When it flops up, cab drivers and people not in the know about the workings of a T3 try to pick up the bag by this "handle"...

It broke before I'd checked on this trip. So far it has just been in overhead compartments... I took a close up picture of what it looks like now, but honestly I don't recall what it is supposed to look like!

After checking it this last trip, it was mashed to the metal hook and after that I couldn't get the balancing bar back up. Took a lot of strength to force it back up!

Now that we're on the topic of the balancing bar, I have two observations about it.

1) I think it needs to be redesigned so that when up it doesnt look like a handle. Possibly keeping the ends (the part that you need to be there for the balancing) as is, but then having the unnecessary center portion be somehow lowered making the bar when upright look more like two upsidedown "U"s with the long plastic strip joining them together close to the suitcase.
2) Look at the size mismatch of the balancing bar and the hole in the briefcase. I would hope in the future that the briefcase cutout in the bottom would be the same length as the balancing bar on the T3. Is that too much to ask?!



As an aside, a colleague recently purchased a Formula T Circuit Brief and I has serious bag envy, until I realized that it had no pass through zipper compartment for this on handle treatment. For me that was a deal breaker. With all of the gear packed into my brief, there's no way I want to carry it around when I could roll it!