Thanks for the recapp Jeff.
During my extended hike I tried three different suspension set ups. I started with the rings because of the weight. I could never get them to hold me up reliably without a knot behind them. My thinking is that if I have to tie a knot, I might as well tie a knot. That is get rid of all the extra hardware and just tie to the tree. I then switched to the cinch buckles. Although costing me an oz. or two the simplicity of them and the fact that I knew that they would hold me without a stopper knot sold me on them. If someone would make these out of aluminum or ti they would be hands down winners in my eyes. I had a failure on one occasion but it was due to operator error. I tried to hang my pack from the buckle with a biner. This skewed the buckle a little. As I entered the hammock the buckle cut the strap in two. It was a clean cut as if from a shear. Fortunately I was not in the best of places to hang and had the strap extended almost its full length so I only lost a few inches of it. I never hung my pack that way again and never had another problem with the buckles.
Youngblood showed me a neat little bend that tied to each end of my hammock. Complete adjustment with no metal hardware. I got rid of all my extra weight and was happy, for a while. I ended up switching back to the buckles and biners and here's why.
Any system will work for me if I'm just going out for a few days. For months on end, I prefer ease of use. To me, the buckles shined because they were no brainers. When I picked out a camp around dusk and it was raining and I was exhausted and my hands were cold enough not to be completely cooperative the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to have to think hard or fiddle with things multiple times. All I had to do was to get my tarp up, snap the biners around the trees, tug on the straps at the buckles to adjust the tension, and pull my skins back and there it was. Home. My sleeping bag stayed around the hammock so it was instantly ready for me to crawl in and go to sleep. Had I not known about these systems I would have just kept tying knots at the trees and been happy. What's that saying?...once you've had adjustable straps, you'll never go back...or something like that.
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