Great to have you back, Risk.
If some of the newbies couldn't tell, Risk is literally one of the first folks to push the "modern" hammock movement forward...although he probably won't take credit for that. Lots of products that are in production now stem from his ideas, either directly or indirectly through the way he applied certain principles to hammocking.
Blush
His website has the first mentions of travel pods (hammock socks) and insulated hammocks that I'm aware of. His discussions with Youngblood at the original Hot Springs Hangs prompted the refinement of underquilts and I suspect helped Youngblood tweak the design that eventually became the SnugFit.
What became clear to me was that insulation without an air space between the hammock body and the hammock was much more efficient. Once I learned that the zig-zag stitch allowed me to sew on the hammock body, I was able to build some nice "down-under" hammocks.
socks... nice term. My term was a take on Ed Speer's pea-pod, but without the insulation. It was a lot simpler than suspending a piece of silnylon under the hammock with cords (the taco). So I called it a travel pod. That was the name of the baggage pod that we put on our USAF fighters when we went on trips. I see that someone has expanded the idea to bug netting. Good work!
Risk inspired me to DIY - literally my first DIY hammock came from his two-layer design - and many of the ideas on my site are just copies of his or are different applications of his ideas. I posted my progress on tothewoods.net, and the traffic from tothewoods is one major reason we started HammockForums...and even though I haven't updated tothewoods.net substantially in a while, I still get emails pretty often about how that website (and then this one) is what got people interested in actually starting to hammock.
So...there's a pretty direct link between Risk's website and the motivation for everything that came after, including Hammock Forums. Much of the community we have on this site today traces back, at least indirectly, to imrisk.com.
Risk - glad to have you back in the game. There has been a lot of innovation in the last few years and I can't wait to see what you do with it.
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