Recently, there was a thread on the good vs evil of making clones of products that you can buy from Hammock Forums members. http://www.hammockforums.net/forum/s...ad.php?t=21465

About halfway through, Dutch said he was a proud cloner. I was extremely relieved to read that as I had made a pair of his namesake clips a few months ago. We had some discussion via PM and all is good. He said he would send along a pair of DC if I would post a thread on how much of a pain in the butt these things are to make using common tools.

Using scraps of aluminum that is 1/2 inch thick I made a rough outline of the clips. I had no idea of the actual dimensions except that they would need at least one inch slots for the straps. At work we have an industrial bandsaw and drillpress so I used those to rough out the basic shape. After that I had to use various files to get the final outline down to a finished piece I could live with. After probably 3-4 hours I still did not have anything fancy. They are pretty beefy weight-wise, I do not have a gram scale so I'm not sure of the actul weight. The hardest part was getting all of the rough edges inside of the slots filed down. There are still tool marks all over so they are really ugly, but they work. All in all, I would not make another pair if I did not have to.
Tony

Here are some pics:


And an action shot: