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slacklinejoe
Nov 20, 2003, 2:18 AM
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After thinking about it, I've decided just to post a How-to rather than trying to sell the quick connects for fall lines. I'd feel guilty charging enough to break even since the amount of effort to make them is much more than the cost of materials. The general idea is to have it guide your safety rope(s) behind you rather than dangle in the way. Yes, you can just duct tape it to your harness or tuck it in your leg loop, but this actually seems much easier and less cumbersome. Here's what you need: 1 mini-carabiner (cheapo works fine, it just needs to lightly hold 2 pieces of rope) 1 Wal-Mart small dog collar with plastic clips (certain ones work better than others) About 2 feet of misc cord/string if you don't have a rear gear loop on your harness. Step 1. If you don't have a gear loop on the back or at least side of your harness, make one using the cord. just loop it around the harness a few times and tie it. Make sure it's very loose and dangles say about 3 inches below the harness itself. Step 2. Trim the male side of the plastic clip a bit. What you want to do is just gently round off the ridge that keeps the male end locked into the female end. You don't want to trim it all, just round it off with a file (I use a dremmel since it's faster). Grind it down enough so that it holds itself in place well, but when yanked it smoothly disengages. This takes trial and error - I found the 3.97 collars only needed a small bit of work, but the cheaper ones needed more grind work and were harder to work with. For the ones I use, trim as shown + the little nubs on the tip if present: http://www.slacklineexpress.com/images/quickconnect.jpg Step 3. Clip your cheap biner through themetal D loop in the collar. Assembly: Grab your harness, and clip the dog collar + biner through a rear gear loop or the string loop you added. http://www.slacklineexpress.com/images/quickclip.jpg http://www.slacklineexpress.com/images/quick.jpg Tie in as usual, and just clip the ropes to the biner. Result: When you fall, the tension on the ropes pulls the plastic clip apart and it slides through your gear loop and it stays hooked to the rope. As you continue down the rope continues to the front and catches you by the front as usual. While I thought it was a cool idea, it wasn't economically feasable. I think I might keep the ones I've already made stocked for those who don't want to bother, but I won't be pushing them either. What do you guys think? Before you blow it off, you might want to actually try it since it does work really slick, once your back up, just re-clip and your set to go again or the next person up can easily clip to it instead. I should add that the dog collar works excellent to keep your tape on too, as long as you just made it where it only releases under a good yank it'll hold it safely in place.
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therealbovine
Nov 20, 2003, 5:42 PM
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Joe, I think its great that you are trying to be an innovator. This idea you have has one problem. When you take the whipper, the mini biner and fastex buckle become dissconnected from the "dog collar" but stays connected to the tether. Have you thought about what happens then? Have you taken a tether fall? There are many different scenarios, but one bad result of your design is the mini biner slapping you in the face during the fall. It could get flung or "snap" back at you and hit you anywhere. I have seen this happen. Not good (in this case stitches above the brow was the result). Just a thought for you. I would not want anything hard flopping around on my tether. Best of luck! Sean
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ropeburn
Nov 20, 2003, 5:55 PM
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Yeah, I agree. I would rather clip the mini biner that is attached to the D on the collar to my harness. Then clip the second mini biner through the collar and to the rope. When the device comes apart, one would only have a mini biner on the rope. Still another thing to hit you when you peel, but atleast it is smaller. :mrgreen:
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slacklinejoe
Nov 20, 2003, 8:19 PM
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In reply to: Yeah, I agree. I would rather clip the mini biner that is attached to the D on the collar to my harness. Then clip the second mini biner through the collar and to the rope. When the device comes apart, one would only have a mini biner on the rope. Still another thing to hit you when you peel, but atleast it is smaller. :mrgreen: I've tried it both ways, no need for a second biner, you can just put the collar around the rope instead of putting it in the biner. In that case, just reverse how it's on your harness, clip to the harness and use the quick connect around the rope. That way it completely eliminates the possibility for a snap back. My biggest problem so far was taking the 2 carabiners that travel behind you to the back fo the head during a fall.. stung like a b--ch but didn't break the skin. I'm not sure you can do much about that though other than maybe wraping it in foam or something (actually come to thik about it that might just work).
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therealbovine
Nov 20, 2003, 8:29 PM
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Joe, If you really think you need a quick disconnect, just think SIMPLE! The buckles and mini biners are just junk you don't need. Ever thought of a simple velcro strap? We've done it. Works great. Just like those speed release starps they used to put on Misty Mountain sport climbing harnesses. NO METAL to be injured by, CHEAP (like most slackers) and works great. Then again so does tucking it into your leg loop, since when turning around and doing different tricks you have to move the tether anyway! Sean Burns
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slacklinejoe
Nov 20, 2003, 8:48 PM
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In reply to: Joe, If you really think you need a quick disconnect, just think SIMPLE! The buckles and mini biners are just junk you don't need. Ever thought of a simple velcro strap? We've done it. Works great. Just like those speed release starps they used to put on Misty Mountain sport climbing harnesses. NO METAL to be injured by, CHEAP (like most slackers) and works great. Then again so does tucking it into your leg loop, since when turning around and doing different tricks you have to move the tether anyway! Sean Burns I'm not a huge fan of velcro in general, but thats just me. It's relatively cheap, but the adhesive backed stuff doesn't stay stuck to what you put it on for too terribly long. I was just looking for something that was still fairly simple, had multiple purposes and was still cheap. Overall it costs like 2-3 bucks and doubles for misc gear holding. I'm just tossing out ideas to the community. I'm certainly not pushing anything in particular, just trying to get others thinking about any other improvements they'd like to see. Kinda just like what you mentioned as far as using velcro, well even it doesn't seem important but others might have found it useful but not thought about using it. No slackline company is going to produce that, but maybe it'd be helpful knowledge for others? I keep seeing people hesitant to actually share things they find useful or what is totally useless and doesn't work. I keep hearing about how everyone has innovative ideas, but either aren't sharing or aren't producing. You'd mentioned having a huge book of ideas before when we talked, well if your not using them for business stuff why not share what does work and what doesn't? Who knows, maybe you'll bounce ideas of people who can contribute to the idea and it'll turn out to be much better for the community in general; either by proving it won't work or that it will and it should be recommended practice. Say for instance this thread gave me the idea of using that same foam I mentioned in the tree friendly thread to wrap around the carabiners on a safety line. You'd need about 6 inches of it and it's dirt cheap and readily available and should just slip over the biners and hold itself in place. Even if I decide that stuff won't work out well (which it probably won't) it reminds me to recommend to people to wrap something soft around their biners as someone already mentioned to be safer since it'll be padding something hard that you could catch to the face. No, I don't plan on selling anything to fill that need, but I do see it as information worth sharing to prevent future stiches. I see that type of thinking very helpful.
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therealbovine
Nov 20, 2003, 9:48 PM
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In reply to: I'm not a huge fan of velcro in general, but thats just me. It's relatively cheap, but the adhesive backed stuff doesn't stay stuck to what you put it on for too terribly long. I was just looking for something that was still fairly simple, had multiple purposes and was still cheap. Overall it costs like 2-3 bucks and doubles for misc gear holding. Not the sticky back variation. Try the type you have to sew. SIMPLE, CHEAP, MULTI PURPOSE and SMART. Your intentions are good but your knowledge base and experience scare me. As far as your "sharing ideas" comment goes, this is America, where "R & D" no longer stands for "Research & Development", but "Rip-off & Duplicate". Some of us, like myself, make a living in the outdoor industry. Giving away ideas that have been developed through hours of hard work would put me under. A fella's gotta eat. Getting these ideas into the market is even more hard work, not to mention very expensive. As more new "companies" start popping out of the woodwork, my time and energy becomes less valued, and the time it takes to get a quality idea from the drawing board to the consumer becomes longer and more expensive. Its much like the climbing hold industry, where for a time you had to buy the "hold recipe" to make your own or just buy from the few manufacturers. Then it became a venture of every other climber in america to make holds and start their own buisness. How many of the old companies have you seen come and go. Its because the "secrets" were shared and the community didn't stick together to back the originators of the ideas. Sharing the how to's is important. The more complex the scenario, the more experience is needed. Not from reading on RC.Com, but by trial and error. Slacklining is a pursuit of soul, a freeing of the mind and the training of the body. Too many people on this planet care for none of these things. Instead they care only about who did what or who has what. Like the thread "does Sharma really smoke pot". All this talk is just blinding us from our own reality....I'm going slackin'.
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slacklinejoe
Nov 20, 2003, 10:40 PM
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[quote="therealbovine"]In reply to: Your intentions are good but your knowledge base and experience scare me. How's sewing easier than cliping? *shrugs* I wasn't asking you to share future product designs, but what about the stuff you decided didn't work or the stuff you never plan on selling? The comment isn't specific to you, but to everyone who's an expert in the field. You're right I'm fairly new to slacking, but I've a long time engineer and programmer. A lesson from the open source software community has proven that you can make a profit even with completely open designs. I've worked as a IT consultant for years as well, even if you tell someone how to do it, you still get jobs because they'd rather have you do it. As for my engineering take for example one of last years projects: My brother's handicaped accessibile van: For those who don't know a decent ramp equiped van with dropped floor pan + custom suspension to handle it all runs about 80,000 pre-made from a older van conversion. The quick version is we picked up a '97 Caravan with a blown motor for 3K, stripped it down to the bare metal, torched out the floor, designed a new laser aligned dropped floor that replaced the entire frame, raised it to compensate for the droped floor, built the hand controls, reused his old ramp system, replaced the fuel tank with a low profile fuel cell, re-worked the existing alarm into a remote opener, created all new suspension brackets, by the time we got done it looked 100% factory and total project cost was around 6K after we put in a new motor. He's put over 40K on it driving back and forth to college, and nothing but good things and it's built stronger than from the factory with extremely tight tolerances. The reason we did it? Necessity. We didn't have the cash for a good setup, so we made one and proved it could be done with nothing but ingeniouty (sp) and dedication. I consider myself a frugal engineer, the business is strictly to help others enjoy the sport. I'd rather inspire others and promote the sport than concentrate on trying to get rich off this stuff 'cus with as cheap as climbers are, unless your making high end gotta have it to climb gear it's not going to happen. There is very little barrier to entry for new businesses in the slackline market, with a small amount of startup cash you can be producing whatever type of setup you'd like - unless your really good at business management and promotion your going to have a hard time 'cus in the end it all comes down to tightening webbing and who can do it the best/cheapest. I'm happy making my money in other places and I find this path much more enlightening and satisfying. Oh well, it's really a moot point since it's unlikely anything will change, but it is an interesting perspective study if nothing else.
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