Hammock Whoopie Sling using Amsteel

As I mentioned back in this post (Emerging from Hibernation), I recently purchased a cheap hammock.  The goal of this is to save weight and volume on camping equipment. Specifically, the camping gear I plan to haul on some bikepacking trips.

The suspension gear that came with the hammock was about as cheap as could be imagined with some cheap “rope” and a couple of heavy steel C clamp type things.

I knew I could do better.

There is a great deal of information about hammocks and many helpful guys over on HammockForums.net. The new wave in suspension is a thing called a whoopie sling.  They are made from Amsteel or Dyneema “rope” which is amazingly strong stuff.  I won’t go into a great deal of detail about how to make them as it is very thoroughly documented on HammockForums.net, such as this thread.

I used 7/64 Amsteel and had some trouble getting it to feed back into itself. I had a bit of problem feeding the Amsteel back into itself.  Every needle/wire I tried was either too big or the doubling over of the Amsteel created too large of a “ball” to fit into itself.  So, the following photos show what I did.

I used a cheap plastic needle from the local sewing store.

I used scotch tape to join the Amsteel to the needle.

The end result being a smooth transition from needle to Amsteel without a ball of material.  This worked pretty smoothly.

The second thing I did was to add some loops to the free ends of the Amsteel to prevent them from being pulled back into the constrictor.  To do this, I started with 8″ long pieces of Amsteel.

After looping this piece thru the end of the line I was protecting, I buried one end at about the middle of the section.

Then buried the other end into the loop.

The result was a nice little loop of Amsteel that prevents the free end from being pulled too far and adds a nice finished touch.

I haven’t had an opportunity to use my Whoopie Sling in the wild yet. The two camping trips I’ve made since making them have been to areas where there are no trees!  I know – sounds strange.  There is actually lots of foliage and scrub but nothing strong enough for a hammock. I hope to try it out soon!!