I've been toying with trying my hand at building my own hammock and finally kicked the project off on Sunday; talking my wife into playing seamstress for me and pushing back all of the furniture in the living room. The hammock is a simple gathered end hammock and is 130 inches long and 60 inches wide. The basic hammock was made using Royal Blue ripstop nylon from JoAnne's and is on the heavy side, although short of weighing it I don't know just how much.
We started by folding a 22' piece of ripstop in half. The fold was at one end of the hammock. The other end and one side was sewed up to produce a really big pocket. The inverted pocket was laid out on the floor. a space blanket was laid on top of that, shiny side down. The blanket was just over7 feet long and nearly 5 foot wide. On top of that was laid a piece of Insulex that was cut to the same size. The upper layer of rip stop and the space blanket and Insulex were sown together along all four sides and then the whole thing inverted again. The result was an 11 foot long double layer hammock with a 7 foot built-in insulation/vb layer. The ends were folded over and sown to produce channels. The hammock ends were then gathered and whipped. Added a whoppie sling as a ridge line and one to either end and then hung out on the back deck.
Added a tarp overhead and a Big Agnus pad between the layers and went out to spend the night. Added 2 layers of clothes, along with a down vest and my new No Sniveller TQ to try and stay warm. The temp that night was right around freezing. I was a little disappointed in the results. The pad slipped around some between layers, and every place I touched the hammock off of the pad was pretty cold. Stayed out until 1:30 and came on in. The lay was fairly comfortable, but I got tired of chasing the pad around. I am a pretty active sleeper so it moved a lot. I am thinking about sewing a pad channel to hold the pad in a fixed position. Also thinking about adding a foot and head box to the ends to keep stuff from falling out so easily.
The hammock is a bit on the heavy side so is not something I would likely take on the trail instead of my WBBB, but it should work well in the basement without having to add an UQ. I will be trying that soon.
Edit: The hammock and slings weighs 2 pounds 5 ounces and packs down (just barely) into the stuff sack that comes with a MV3.
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