What weight-saving or safety-increasing tricks have you used to play with redundancy between different pieces of your equipment?
I can envision a couple of ways in which this might work. First, two pieces of equipment that serve different purposes can be replaced by just one of them. For example, I made an adaptor (a nut plus a screw with a crankable wheel fused to it) so that my shovel blade accepts an ice-axe as its handle (provided the axe doesn't have a finger rest at its base). This way I can leave the shovel handle at home, saving fully half of its weight, and the axe makes a perfectly useable handle. Of course, this example depends on the common equipment (ice axe as axe and as handle) not being required to serve both purposes at once, which is usually true in this case.
In the complementary scenario, an element that serves only one purpose can be replaced with one that serves two. For example, rucksack straps can be replaced with rated webbing, to be used in an emergency
Any personal favourites?
