I was at REI the other day and happened to notice a spool of camouflage webbing in the climbing department. Typically REI is not known for its adventurous webbing selection — Bluewater makes several colors of webbing yet green and purple are consistently the only two the REI stocks (possibly the two most boring [...]

If you’ve spent any amount of time on this site you probably know I am a fan of line-lockers. They keep the webbing flat, protect it reasonably well, and for nylon webbing typically ensure about 95% of rated strength (instead of the 50 or 65% that a knot might). The first line lockers [...]

It used to be that “slackline” meant any one-inch tubular rock climbing webbing pulled reasonably taut so that it could be walked by a human. Then people started using Type18 flat webbing. Then polyester webbings. Then 2-inch flat and tubular webbing. And so on. Rigging methods now involve not just [...]

Sometimes deals can be found on webbing from obscure vendors, sometimes not; I ended up with 60ft of milspec this way once after ordering 60ft of Type18. Of course the vendor refunded me and told me to keep the webbing, so maybe that wasn’t such a bad deal.
Just before we left for [...]

Today marks the first installment in our “destructive testing” series.  The purpose of this series of posts is to investigate what happens when stuff breaks, and how much force it takes to make stuff break.  Safety is my number one concern, and my hope is that these experiments will help everyone to better understand how [...]

There’s a new line locker on the market that shows great promise for short lines.  SMC (Seattle[ish]-based-rigging-hardware-manufacturer) has just released a collar-shaped 1″ inner diameter aluminum ‘rigging ring’ that looks to make a great line locker ($4.50 at REI as well as from SMC directly).  I picked up a couple today and (magical time traveling [...]

Thanks to the efforts of Jerry at balance community, I now have a 600ft piece of Type18 that I will stretch to a bit over 650ft and walk this spring.  Stay tuned!
I am also working on posting a “records page” with info on all the domestic and international records, broken down by category, as well [...]

Slackline is different from tightrope, tightwire, slackrope, (etc) in that it uses a dynamic webbing. Although slackline webbing feels flat, and feels static when in your hands, it is actually a tube (that is stretched flat), and once you put your weight on it you can feel it is quite elastic.
There is some semantic [...]