Originally Posted By: aardwolfe

I had difficulty getting the hammock stretched tightly enough, until I took a survival course from Mors Kochanski, in the course of which I was introduced to the turnbuckle (or parbuckle?) knot. Basically, you tie a figure-of-eight knot in the line, but don't feed the end of the line all the way through; so you have a loop sticking through one end of the figure-of-eight. The end of the line goes through the straps around the tree, and is then fed back through this loop. The loop acts like a pulley and changes the direction of the pull; the result is, when you pull on the line to tighten it, you are pulling it toward the tree rather than away from the tree. This makes it much easier to tie off the line without it slipping and causing the hammock to sag.


A word of caution: I was doing something similar to what aardwolfe is describing above with my Hennessy Hammock. One night, the ridgeline snapped with me in the hammock. It snapped exactly at the point I had tied a figure eight loop for the purpose of tightening (as described above). Apparently, as the knot constricts around the inner fibers, the fibers can be weakened. I talked with the folks at Hennessy Hammock via email. They say they've seen very few ridgeline breaks except when some kind of knot or tensioning device has been applied to the line. The line can be replaced by the way.

If you do use a figure eight to tighten the line, make sure it's in the foot end. When my line snapped, my feet hit the ground first, no big deal (except for severely wounded pride). If you tie the figure eight in the head end and there is a break, guess what hits the ground first. A lot more than your pride could get injured in this scenario.
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