After the first week with my AB, a week of comfort and the true feeling of being able to slap a fedora on with one hand and dash out the door, I can honestly say it is the best hat I have ever owned.
With that sense of relief comes a calm, and with that calm comes the wish to tinker with older hats. My Akubra Federation is the only other hat I own, given to me by Rundquist years ago in SoCal. He bashed it himself and I have never changed it. It was as close to Raiders as an Akubra could get...pre-turn revelation.
Since that time, it has experienced the heat of Death Valley, sleet, hail, snow, intense rain, humid heat, being crushed, dropped, sat on, and a whole slew of other misfortunes. It still looks great, and is now so soft and pliable that I can put a Last Crusade bash in the back of it with my fingers and wear it backwards as a totally different hat!
Anyway, tonight I decided to give it that Raiders turn. It was a very successful experiment for this beaten hat which I can now say, in the brim anyway, looks completely Cairo.
Ignore the black ribbon (yeah, a lot of you missed those days), ignore the bow being too far forward, and ignore the tapering in the crown. This is purely about the brim and what it will do on a turn after three years of softening, weathering, and abuse without any reblocks, care, or Scotchguard. Dang the Akubra is a tough hat!
