This morning as usual, I woke up early, twisted around a bit and went back to sleep. About a half hour later, BOOM!, well, that's what I thought. What I knew for sure was that I was laying on my back on the floor. I have a lamp beside my hammock and I felt around and turned it on, sure enough, I was on the floor. Further investigation showed me that the strap on the foot end of my hammock had broken where it entered the cinch buckle.
The strap is one I bought around two years ago, I think from Amazon, it is a camo, mil spec strap that several forums members were buying at the time in odd length rolls and pretty cheap. I have used this strap for a lot of hangs with out issue, BUT, when I started using it with cinch buckles I found that if I set up and did no adjustments for a few days, it would slip a bit during the night and mess up my hang. To counter this I added a slippery half hitch behind the buckle on each end. At this point my un-scientific conclusion is that being held by the cinch buckle at the exact same place, over several nights with a large body bearing on it, the strap compressed enough to significantly weaken it and it broke. For set ups that change every day I feel that there would have been no problem, but for hangs that are static for longer periods of time here at home, I will use chain.
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