Noob at hammock camping. Not so noob at using cordage in the outdoors. Hunting, fishing, camping, wilderness canoeing in bear country, and 30 plus years in the Armed Forces, I have used my fair share of cordage to set up shelters, secure loads, etc.
Looking at all the stuff here about whoopies, UCRs, ridgelines, etc. of course what gets mentioned is the ever-present Amsteel Blue, as well as Dynaglide and Zing-it et al. My problem is, all that gets mentioned, and often all one can find is the 1000lb, 1600lb....."Breaking Strength". All that is is "Tensile Strength" - put it in a machine - stretch it till it breaks, take an average of a number of tests and you got your number. No knots, no bouncing, no G-forces. I gotta tell ya, I could give a hoot what the tensile strength is, I want to know Safe Working Load Limit (Some manufacturers include this). This tells you what amount of weight it is safe to attach this cordage to. In some types of cordage this can under 10% of the tensile strength. Materials and method of construction being key factors here.
I have hanks of the ubiquitous 550 paracord that all state 550 tensile. Some have as little as 33lb SWLL and the highest is 115lb. Utility cordage from the same manufacturer, same size, same construction, different materials - tensiles are not as far apart as the SWLL as fractions of each other - weaker cordage has 2/3 the tensile and 1/3 the SWLL of the stronger.
So, pardon my rant, and since most everyone here is trusting one or more of these to keep their butts off the ground, I am sure they are more than adequate, satisfy my curiosity will ya? What is the SWLL of these various cordages?
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