with apologies to Lennon/McCartney...not to mention HRM Queen Elizabeth...
Doing my part to sustain the Thread That Won't Die, I contracted with Dutch's Center for Pretty Good Computational Metalurgy to drill some holes in, ah, HRM's head. Specifically, coming home from the UK a couple of months ago I brought back some pound coins with the notion of using them---somehow---in the hammock suspension.
So I gave Dutch some cool universal digital camo fabric out of which he will make some amazing gear, and he drilled some holes in the coins, and tossed in a couple of his anchors, and a couple of 3-hole hex bars in the bargain. HRM with four holes weighs 8.5 grams, the hex bar less than 3 grams.
The use I've put these to are motivated by my (surprise!) DIY bridge hammock, but have more general applicability I think. The idea is to make a fast connection to an object (in my case a ring), in such a way that it is pretty easy to adjust the length of the cords used in the connection by moving the coin.
Huh?
A bridge hammock has cords from the spread bars that meet at a ring; the hammock hangs from the rings at each end. I'm using one piece of cord, ends of which are connected to the ends of the hammock. I'm wanting an easy way to attach and disattach this cord from the ring. Furthermore, I'm wanting a way to effectively change the length of the cords going from the hammock corners to the ring.
So I've threaded each side of the cord through two holes in the coin.
don't worry about the red bit of cord, its role will be clearer later. Now you can take the loop and pass it through a ring and bring back towards the coin
then bring it up against the cord coming from the hammock corners
and snug it up to the coin
The main attraction of this trick is that it makes connecting the hammock to the ridgeline and suspension trivial, and a fraction of the weight of using a biner to do the same thing (ridgeline is the bright orange, rings at each end of it).
Now you can see that the red bit of cord is to pull the loops out, so that the coin can be positioned to effectively change the length of the sides of the bridge's suspension triangle [there are various reasons I want sometimes to change these lengths, but not often. ]
I thought of a couple of ways of using the hex bars I got. One is to just use the fact that it has 3 holes in it to make a connection between suspension line and tree webbing. In the picture belong the black lines come from the ring, to the bar, back to the ring, back to the bar, back to the ring, and tied off. Did I ever mention that I'm fond of mechanical advantage?
In the picture above the straps are put on the tree by lark's head; the cord with hex bar has a bowline tied on double lines, and the bar is threaded through the webbing loops and bowline loop.
We can use the hex bar in the same way as we did the coin, and not risk being tossed into the slammer if found with such a coin in the UK. Here a loop is formed by pulling a loop of cord through one hole, the knot is placed to inhibit the bar from sliding off the cord (although there really is no danger of that, it's a tight squeeze through that little hole).
And we can use this to clip the suspension triangle onto the ridgeline ring also. The main difference is that this arrangement is lighter, and non-adjustable.
thanks to Dutch for cool toys.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming...
Grizz
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Originally Posted by schrochem
). Isn't money the property of the government or something?
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