Last week I made a six-hour (return) trip to Melbourne in order to buy an Aarn Peak Aspiration pack. I came home empty-handed because we (the staff at Backpacking Light and I) could not get the pack quite comfortable - and we must have spent over an hour trying (my thanks to the very friendly and patient staff who tried to help me)!
The problem was essentially a mismatch between the shape of my back and the shape of the pack. My lumbar region was closer to vertical than the bottom section of the pack (the part where the hip belt joins) and so instead of the hip belt load being spread over the full height of the belt, I felt the top of the belt digging in to my back. Loosening the upper belt strap and tightening the lower belt strap made little difference, nor did pulling the top of the pack closer to my shoulders help much; it was the frame angle that was the problem.
I had seen YouTube videos showing people removing the centre frame and bending it to match the wearer's spine, but when I asked the staff about this they told me that Aarn no longer recommends bending the frame (or maybe says it is no longer supposed to be necessary), and that with the current release of the Peak Aspiration pack it would be impossible to get the frame back in if we took it out!
I went back to check this on the Aarn web site, and certainly all the fitting videos (which might once have shown frame bending) are currently unavailable.
It seems a backward step if the revised pack design makes the packs less customisable.
I contacted Aarn via email (about a different question) a week or so ago but have no reply yet, otherwise I would have tried that before posting here. Presumably he will update the fitting instructions on his web site in due course, and it would obviously be a better use of his time to update the instructions there for everyone rather than answering lots of individual questions.
In the mean time, does anyone have any suggestions? If not I guess I have to wait for revised instructions in the hope that there is a new fitting method that the staff at Backpacking Light had not been told about. Or I can try to find somewhere with old stock that still supports the frame bending method. Or I can look at other brands, possibly in conjunction with Aarn pockets...