How do you eliminate foot bunching in tight spaces

**Phantom Grappler** · 09-30-2019, 20:06

Good ideas on saving money
One way to get more comfort from a hammock is use a larger hammock. This may or may not fit in your insulated room. You can superinsulate a small room but must be careful to have enough fresh air circulating to prevent suffocation.
Some ultralight hikers favor a 10 by 5 foot hammock. There is more chance of calf ridge pressure with that length.

Eleven feet by five feet hammocks are used by many campers.

A few of us have chosen 12 by 6 hammocks for greater comfort. You could use a ten foot ridgeline for your 12 foot hammock. A longer and wider hammock might eliminate calf ridge pressure and or your foot bunching.
If your room was ten feet long, then you could attach a 12 foot hammock directly to walls and skip the hammock ridgeline.
If your room was shorter than ten feet long, maybe you could get more length by hanging hammock on diagonally opposite corners.

I have not measured the vertical height my hammock requires.

Good luck saving money and living with less demands on your time, for a life with less stress.

**meant2b** · 09-30-2019, 21:01

I'll fess I never used to notice the calf ridge/butt crack pressure when I was using the full room versus the tiny room. Part of the reason also for the small dimensions is to leave walking room through the rest of the house available. With the 4x8 room it was putting a crimp on available space. Once I get things cleaned up now that the rebuild is done I will have a lot more left over space.

One of my main concerns going back to this past spring was the air circulation. I was highly worried about it. I have been using a rubbing alcohol stove for quite a few years now at home. I know when fall starts to come around and I am closing the door on the room and sealing things off in the evening and I go to cook supper I always notice, for the first several weeks, the 'smell' from the rubbing alcohol. I knew with this room there is no way I do anything with an open flame and I was worried about the air circulation. I slept in the room last night and had no problems, a bit surprisingly. I have thought about the idea of adding a 'kitty door' into the main door and having it only open up to maybe 9-12 inches high so it would still be below the inner floor level. I'm not sure exactly how oxygen works, if it rises or settles...aka, would it move in the door and come up into the room or would it only settle down at main floor level.

So far this year, all expenses included, living on my own, I've spent 2097.22 as of the end of September. By far the cheapest year thus far. My main expense being food, granted almost half the food expense has been junk food.

**meant2b** · 09-30-2019, 22:20

Originally Posted by ecologito

It depends on how tight, have you tried a bridge hammock?

Sorry, I'm thinking out loud as I type this post. It may get real sketchy, real fast. I seriously apologize. Actually I had another post typed out and about ready to post but I think I MAY have figured out a possible solution. Granted it will require a flat hammock versus a hammock with sides to help keep you from falling out, which I have always liked. And yes, sorry ecologito but I started looking at the bridge hammock idea you mentioned and it started this whole crazy thought process so I figured I would quote your post

I know I have seen a couple of posts talking about hanging up hammocks indoors and questioning 2x4 and their strength so I'll throw in here my personal experiences with sleeping indoors since I have been doing it for a dozen years now.

For the past four years I have been sleeping in the mini room built with 2x3 pine and 1/4 plywood for the walls and ceiling. It has held me up fine and I have never had any kind of worries about walls falling down on me or anything like that. At the present time with the present room there is no direct connection to house made by the room. It sits on top of the floor and is in no way directly attached to the house. If/when I replace the 'structural' screws with bolts I will be able to be quickly take apart and rebuild the room. My hope is to build a room that I can take apart and take outside and set up temporarily outside to test in true real world environment when the temps get below zero Fahrenheit. The past two winters I have seen the temperature hit 28 degrees on the kitchen countertop, not in the heated area, while it was subzero right outside the window. I would love to be able to test outside to know how well the insulating system would work in a true real world environment. For that I need something I can quickly dismantle and rebuild in a matter of 15-20 minutes...other than getting the insulation put back in place. I don't want something which has to be structually sound/permitted hence why I want something which can be quickly dismantled and reassembled for taking outside and using on the 5-10 nights a year after a snow storm has passed through and the skies have cleared out and the winds have died leaving me with the coldest nights of the year...perfect conditions for testing my system out. I can put up the room and take it back down in short order and no one knows a thing about it.

Right now I have been using u-bolts up by the ceiling of the room. They go through the 2x3 and 1/4 inch plywood and tighten down securely...very little play space available for the fabric to be able to slip/move around. I'm using a 4-5 yard piece of fabric. The one end has been hung up with minimal fabric showing past the u-bolt, just enough when I tying a knot in the gathered fabric itself to give a knot. The other end after it is knotted in place I still have enough fabric left over to hang down on the floor, basically 3-4 feet of fabric left over.

With the current room idea I first tried taking a piece of wood and folding the fabric in half before wrapping several times around the piece of wood. I did attach it to the wood with electrical tape to try and help keep it from wanting to slip. It seemed to work, granted at that point in time I wasn't building the walls the way they are built now so the walls were the problem. The main problem with the hammock hang was if I needed to replace the fabric it would be a pain in the butt to deal with because of the wrap method. To keep the fabric from slip I was wrapping the fabric around the piece of wood and bringing the fabric up over top the 2x3/underneath the 1/4 inch plywood, leaving less room for screwing down the plywood and making for more work if I needed to replace the fabric. I decided to discard the idea and go back to gathering/tying the knot and using the u-bolt.

Right now I'm thinking about sliding the fabric down and leaving identical lengths of fabric on both ends. Gather the ends and knot them. Put them through the u-bolt but move the u-bolt from up by the ceiling down to midway up the wall. Bring the fabric up, flat, through a piece of wood mounted inside the room to the 2x3s the ceiling sits on and then drape the fabric on down to the other side of the room. This would leave me with a flat hammock versus a folded hammock effect. Basically it would provide two mount points, one gathered end and the other flattened out.

I'll reask my question as I think this idea may actually work but it presents a new problem. With a flat hammock is there any way of still maintaining sides or are you pretty much stuck with a flat hammock only? I do like having the sides on the hammock so you know your not going to fall out

**SilvrSurfr** · 09-30-2019, 23:26

My first comment is: you need to adjust your living space to accommodate a decent-sized hammock (I would suggest 11 ft.) sleeping with the correct diagonal. It sounds like you have no excuse why you couldn't do that. It seems your desire to insulate the absolute minimum space possible has led to rather lousy hammock-hanging conditions.

My second comment is: dude - you're out there. You're living on the edge. I'm torn between "I'd really like to meet that guy" and "I hope I never meet that guy."

**oldgringo** · 10-01-2019, 08:08

I will echo that: design your hammock first. Make it personal. Measure in centimeters, not feet. Avoid arbitrary measurements like 4x 6 feet or 11 feet. Then build your space around the hammock...think outside the rectangular box. Good luck, and keep us informed.

**gargoyle** · 10-01-2019, 09:05

What are the actual dimensions of your box? WxH x L?

As with any diy hammock, how you gather the ends can cause issues. Try a few different gathering techniques to try to alleviate the pinching.

You may have too small a space to comfortably hang a hammock?

**meant2b** · 10-01-2019, 10:42

Originally Posted by SilvrSurfr

My first comment is: you need to adjust your living space to accommodate a decent-sized hammock (I would suggest 11 ft.) sleeping with the correct diagonal. It sounds like you have no excuse why you couldn't do that. It seems your desire to insulate the absolute minimum space possible has led to rather lousy hammock-hanging conditions.

My second comment is: dude - you're out there. You're living on the edge. I'm torn between "I'd really like to meet that guy" and "I hope I never meet that guy."

To ease your mind. What I am trying to do is find a starting point to work with where I am energy free and build out from there. I first need to get to where I am not using any outside heat source and then I can start from there and build outward/bigger and retest each winter as I get it bigger and bigger until it breaks and then pull back slightly to my last known successful source.

Sometimes you have to be forward looking to see what is coming down the pike for you/society. Stop watching the news and start thinking for yourself. The tell-a-vision is programming your mind the way they want you to think, hence the name tell-a-vision...program. All the BS talk about global warming, which is BS, is telling you they want one thing, to rape and pillage you more through carbon credit taxes. They want you to have less and they will have more by taking it from you because you rely on them for everything. The less you need of them the less power they have over you. I want to eliminate the need for them as much as possible so they can't control me. Unlike what some people will tell you...freedom IS free. Freedom is not free when you give it up and let someone else control you. Its the worst when you don't realize they are controlling you/your thoughts/your ideals and how they are controlling you. Mankind use to live fine before some idiot flew a kite in the middle of lightning storm. Mankind doesn't need the internet, television, automobile, cell phone, etc. They may be nice to have but they are totally unnecessary. Look at how the media tells you, you can't live without it. Your a nobody if you don't have the latest iphone, or the latest this or that. It's all programming. I don't fall for it. I gave up the tell-a-vision over a decade ago. I don't carry a cell phone on me. I haven't owned a car in almost a decade. I have learnt how to get by on less and have more freedom as a result.

**meant2b** · 10-01-2019, 11:12

Originally Posted by gargoyle

What are the actual dimensions of your box? WxH x L?

As with any diy hammock, how you gather the ends can cause issues. Try a few different gathering techniques to try to alleviate the pinching.

You may have too small a space to comfortably hang a hammock?

6x3x roughly 3.5 feet. Not sure the exact height measurement as I have not actually measured the inside height from the artificial floor up to the ceiling yet. The overall measurement from the real floor, with 18 inches of insulation between it and the artificial floor, and the ceiling is 5 feet, hence why I say it is roughly 3.5 feet high.

I

**Phantom Grappler** · 10-01-2019, 11:23

If you have access, watch YouTube videos and use Google to see various types of gathered end hammocks. Some are hybrids, part gathered end and part something else and not necessarily bridge hammocks.
I’m not sure, remember seeing a gathered end hammock with a spreader bar on one end. This is one of hybrids I mentioned. Maybe this will stop your foot scrunch. Not sure if foot scrunch is what is known as calf ridge pressure. CRP—
CRP happens—hahaha
Sometimes my foot closest to hammock edge would be bent inward at ankle. This was in an 11 by 5 hammock. It was not actually 5 feet wide after all edge sewing was done—maybe 58 inches wide instead of 60 inches wide.
I switched to 12 by 6 foot hammock to keep my foot from being turned inward at edge of hammock...also greatly reduced or eliminated calf ridge pressure. Probably can get same result with hammock 11 and half feet long by 5 and half feet wide.
Or just a different cottage vendor makes a more comfortable hammock that is 11 by 5
I does not know

Good luck and keep us posted on your hammock adventures!

**Phantom Grappler** · 10-01-2019, 14:51

If I understand your description, you are insulating walls, ceiling-roof, floor of your sleep area.
A few brave souls have trip reports describing comfortable outdoor hammock sleeping down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
Down underquilts and topquilts are used. Some might have synthetic insulated underquilts and topquilts. Sometimes closed cell foam pads are used.
Also insulated pods are in the mix, enveloping entire hammock like a sock
Oops, hammock socks have been put to work too!
Hot water bottles wrapped in wool socks have staved off frozen toes.
Gossamer Gear sells large closed cell foam pads about 1/8 inch by 40 inches by 70 inches. If too large, easy to trim to size with large scissors!

Search old threads here on Hammock Forums, or browse Hammock Forums this fall—as cold weather looms, new threads will explore hammock insulation all over again.