I've been following the Turtledog stand thread with great interest lately, thinking of different ways to work out a two-person version for the wife and I to share. Then, a few weeks ago, This post by gmcttr really caught my attention. The poles are heavy and expensive to ship, but they would be very flexible to allow construction of something that worked well for us.
And, 30 poles and a bunch of stainless steel hardware from Home Depot later, we ended up with this:
Or, by day:
Without the Kelty 16x16 tarp, it's a little easier to see what we did:
It works a lot like the turtledog stand - it's designed to pretty much exert only compression force everywhere, but since we wanted to be able to do two hammocks side-by-side, we had to figure out a way to use triangles to form a stable base to support two of the ridge poles.
The end sections, rather than being tripods, consist of one large triangle, which has a cross bar for stability at the point where the hammocks hang, and two back legs, which can be placed at the same point to provide a very stable triangle
These triangle sections are connected using stainless steel hardware from home depot, with eye bolts and chain connectors keeping everything connected:
These connections are semi-permanent, with only the apex of the triangle being disconnected when the stand is taken down. The whole top triangle packs down like this:
We also used snap buttons from Grainger to keep all of the poles "clicked" together, making it possible to move the stand without the pieces coming apart, and I used colored duct tape to mark the sections for easy assembly. All torn down, it packs into two bags just a hair over four feet long, small enough to fit in the trunk of a Jeep or the back seat of a car
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