Last night I made my first attempt at building a hammock. It was nothing spectacular, but it worked and held my 190lb body comfortablly off the ground. I thought for a few hours about the easiest design that I could come up with, and this is what I did:
First I cut a section of fabric 4.5 feet longer than I am (about 10.5 feet altogether). Then I bunched the fabric at each end and tied a square knot in the end. This knot will be the anchor point for tying the hammock to the tree. I then wrapped cord around the hammock side of the knot and tied the other end to the tree. This was pretty much it. I have plans to do more work on this hammock and add some features. I was just very pleasently surprised at how easy it was to get my base hammock done.
One thing that I am going to add to this hammock is bug netting. I have an idea to make this like a large sock to just fit over the whole hammock with a drawstring closure at each end of the cylinder. This way I will have minimum sewing to do and I will be able to keep bugs off me for the most part. When not in use, this bug netting will just be bunched up at the foot portion of the hammock. I also have ideas to put a stash pocket on the outside of the hammock and install loops for a ridge line on the bug netting. My final project will be making a tarp to keep the water off of me.
If you have any ideas or a better way to do some of the things that I have mentioned, please let me know eithe rwith a comment here or e-mail me at [email protected]. Keep in mind that I am persuing a very simple and easy design for this project.
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Hey guys. Let me first thank all the people who come to this site and read my rantings and ravings. This post is to tell some of you about an idea that I came up with even though I'm sure I'm not the first one to do this. I was tinkering with my soda can stoves last night and decided that I wanted to create a stove that better directed the heat to the bottom of my Heiney pot. After a little thinking I decided to change the position of the jet holes. Instead of putting them on the outside of the ring on the bottom of the can, I put the holes on the inside. I put holes (about 16) evenly spaced all around the inside edge of that ring. The result was a more concentrated flame on the concave portion of the Heiny pot bottom. This is a gear list from a overnight trip that I took a few weeks ago. I am posting this to see what I could lighten up and what I could just altogether leave at home. Let me know what you would change, add, or leave behind. Something that I have been trying out for the past few trips that I have taken is freezer bag cooking. For those of you who are unfimilar with this term, it is simply cooking your food in a ziploc freezer bag (freezer bags are used because they are a little thicker and thus more resistant to melting due to the hot water). About a week and a half ago, me and some buddies went to the Little Blakely Loop area of Lake Ouchita. It was a very good hike and a little more challenging that we had expected. It was wet because of some rain that we had just gotten in Arkansas, but the hike was still very relaxing. Despite some slippery spots, the rain didn't change the hike portion of our trip. We went out on a peninsula and then came back (just made an oval shape on the peninsula). The hike was harder then we had thought it was going to be because the come back part of the oval was on the steep side of the hill and there was a lot of up and downing. We finally made camp near a creek in a flat semi-grassy area about 150 yds off of the trail. (Wecamped here because we couldn't find the place that Tim Ernst had suggested to camp in his book.) The place was an awesome place to camp. We had plenty of wood (some was even dry) and the ground was suprisingly absent of rocks. It was a little chilly so I set up my Marmot Eos 1P and put some hand warmers in my sleeping bag "system" (which consisted of a Western Mountaineering Highlight with a Marmot Trails used as a liner bag). Needless to say my night was a little to warm. After the usual around the fire banter and the recap of the day's events, we all went to bed for the night. When we got up next morning, we awoke to the area being complely clouded by this foggy mist. (One of my friends was to scared to go out of his tent.) After we marveled at the beautiful morning, we made breakfast, broke camp, and went on our way. The second day of hiking proved to be much shorter, but still enjoyable. We made it back to our cars and went to Oaklawn for a day of betting on horse races. |