fabric as tree strap material?

Has anyone experimented with using a width of fabric as a tree strap rather than webbing?

I was messing around with some strips of rip stop nylon for a pack project and it got me thinking. Wouldn't a six inch wide strip of fabric be strong enough and lighter than webbing? Wouldn't it also distribute the weight better on the tree assuming it was tied right? More of a sling than a strap... Or two tiny hammocks to hammock my hammock to the tree. How you treated the edges of the fabric would be important for sure.

Would that work or am I heading for a bruised tailbone?

That's a good question. A couple years ago when I modded my first ENO by cutting off the sides, I had 10 inch wide strips of fabric. I thought at the time they might be used as tree straps but I never ended up trying it. Curious to see if anyone has.

Given the stresses placed on the tree huggers I would be unwilling to trust strips of fabric. I think the concensus is the suspension and tree huggers should have ~1500 lb rating. In any event, don't hang higher than you are willing to fall.

If I test it I will use a lose amsteel line as backup so I fall an inch or two. It seems like you could distribute the load pretty good. At least that's the way it works in my head...

The problems I see are, as Ramblinrev pointed out, the weight rating and I would also add abrasion resistance. You might get away with hanging on the fabric a couple of times, but long term it won't hold up to the friction on the tree. This is especially true of nylon fabric as it will stretch and move laterally across the bark of the tree.

In addition to the above, I suspect it will be somewhat troublesome to get the fabric to spread out evenly to it's full width to take advantage of the "distribute the weight" factor.

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Originally Posted by Mouseskowitz

The problems I see are, as Ramblinrev pointed out, the weight rating and I would also add abrasion resistance. You might get away with hanging on the fabric a couple of times, but long term it won't hold up to the friction on the tree. This is especially true of nylon fabric as it will stretch and move laterally across the bark of the tree.

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This would be my concern. As the ripstop gets used it will develop stress points and one little nub on the tree bark could cause a catastrophic failure. With a webbing tree strap I'm fairly confident that I will see stress on the webbing long before it's at risk of giving way... I'm not sure that'd be the case with ripstop.

Of course if you check and change out the ripstop often enough, and are carefuly about the bark you hang from you could avoid this. I'm sure it's workable, I'd just rather have something I know is bomb proof.