OK, this is what happens when the IRS tells me that I need to revisit filing years 2006-2009. I immediately try to fill my head with anything but!
That in turn led me to reading some Horace Kephart (Believe it or not he was mentioning hammocks as far back as 1916!) He also discussed "bedrolls" at great length in his two volume Camping and Woodcraft book. He goes over why cotton is bad and the merits of down, but he also speaks highly of wool batting for insulation in a bedroll as it handles compressing and decompressing well.
Soooooooooo. Tangent number four leads to tangent number five, and I begin wondering about using wool batting to insulate a hammock (Since this is after all a hammock forum and not a tax forum.) That lead me to wonder aloud if anyone had ever tried to make a differentially cut double layered hammock? Sure, I would lose the added strength of the second layer, BUT I would also have a fairly fixed gap between layer one and layer two to use.....wait for it..wool batting.
While I am not sure about the practical use of such a work, I could not help but ponder how warm three inches of wool batting would be.
Some will chime in "But Wisenber isn't wool batting heavy and doesn't it smell when it gets wet?" Well, I cannot win on the weight part of the question, but I did see where treated wool that has the lanolin removed can have lanolin readded to make the wool pretty darned water resistant -more so than down or any synthetic presently on the market. I've read where folks using "natural" diapers for their kids use wool on the outside then treat the wool with lanolin to prevent leakage. If lanolin will stop that, surely it would be a pretty robust treatment to prevent the batting of absorbing moisture. (Horace Kephart swore by it for his wool garments.)
So ponder if you will a diff cut gathered end double layer hammock. If the bottom layer were longer, would it make for a relatively fixed gap between the layers?
Then, what do you think of putting a thick layer of wool batting between those two layers if the gap worked out?
I did not know which sub forum this applied to most, so I thought I'd start with DIY. ( Moderators, feel free to move this in another section if needed, or help me with three years' worth of taxes.)
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