4 Attachment(s)
Recent adjustments to my bamboo stand
I made several minor adjustments to my bamboo stand that made it easier to use in several ways. It served remarkably well this weekend in a motel room. The adjustments were:
- replacing the shortest two of the three sections of chain link fence top rail with one longer one. This eliminated the extra connector and bulk in the storage bag.
- using small cord (pink in the photos) to hold open the para cord loop the rail hangs from, and to keep the loop in place during transport yet hang free to self-adjust when weighted.
- replaced toggles with shorter, fatter toggles made from dowel rod.
- retied the spread limiter cords higher up the legs where they are shorter thus eliminating the shock cord and ring I used previously to tension these for transporting. Now hey do not tangle around the ends of the poles.
These four changes makes the stand much easier to set up. Eliminating the one section of pipe and connector from the storage bag made me able to position the stand much more conveniently in my car's back seat. Now two people can ride back there if needed. That unplanned improvement was a super gift!
Other changes:
I relashed the poles (green cord in photos) higher up the pole ends to raise the hammock to a more comfortable height. Yippee!
I put some wraps of gorilla tape under the lashings on each pole to keep the lashings from sliding down the pole. This works but I want a better solution for this tendency of the lashings to slide on the smooth bamboo.
I replaced all my colorful duct tape menagerie with black gorilla tape.
I decided to use the gorilla tape to bind up one of the black bamboo poles that had split and I had taken out of the system. The walls of this pole were much thicker than the any of the replacement poles I had. I wanted to see if it would work even though it was split the entire length of the pole. It appears to work well. You can see that pole in one of the photos -- it has tape every 9".
I decided to go with all black bamboo poles even though some of them were smaller in diameter than the yellow bamboo poles in my collection. In inventorying my stash of bamboo poles, I discovered that the black bamboo poles were consistently thicker walled than the yellow bamboo poles.
This weekend I spent some time pondering what to put over the ends of the bamboo poles to eliminate moisture getting in. I decided maybe the fingers cut from rubber gloves may work well. The tops of the poles could do with thick latex gloves, but I want thicker rubber gloves for the ground end.