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Damaged 1.6 oz HyperD hammock fabric - Should I be concerned?
My first post in the forums, but boy, have these forums been useful! To date, I've made three nice hammocks that I use all the time, and the information I've found here about making, improving, and using hammocks has been totally game-changing. Literally! I took my first homemade hammock on a week-long backpacking trip in the Tuolumne section Yosemite last summer, and it was such a revelation to sleep in the hammock instead of on the ground.
Between my wife and I making gear, almost everything I have now is homemade (including a Ray-Way backpack, which was also a game changer!). Anyway, the hammock in question here is the very one that I took on the Sierra trip (my profile pic is from that trip, in that hammock). I've gotten a ton of use and spent many days and nights in the local and distant mountains hanging in it. Recently, I discovered that despite being very careful with my gear, the fabric of the hammock has been damaged. It's about a 1/2 inch spot, and i have to guess it was from a key or something? Here's a close-up photo of it:
Attachment 181013
If this was a backpack or something, i'd just throw some tenacious tape on it and call it good, but as this is a piece of gear that is pretty critical, whose failure mid-trip would be pretty catastrophic, I'm kind of concerned. The forces that are put on a hammock are way bigger than a backpack or shirt. Should I just replace it, or maybe retire it from backpacking duty? I've heard of (and even once seen) hammock failures, and in both cases, it was an instant and totally catastrophic failure. Kind of funny when no one gets hurt, but not funny in the middle of an outing. The one time I saw it happen was with a cheapo hammock that was not made of a ripstop fabric like HyperD.
Thoughts?
