Yes! In fact, this summer at Boy Scout camp, our troop made several toggle ropes with paracord. It was lots of fun. I think making a version with sisal would be interesting, but I don’t think it would work well because the sisal twine isn’t braided, so the individual strands would be liable to splitting when you opened up the braid to toggle.

If I wanted to go crazy, I have a big spool of sisal twine I could use to make ropes to braid. I did say crazy though. There’s a fair bit of work to that and I’m not sure I’d trust the end result. But I’ve always enjoyed the pioneering stuff since our troop worked on the MB so many years ago.

I’m quite comfortable with knots and ropes. Probably more so than with figuring out all of the various pieces of hardware available. Plus, ropes are less expensive than all the gadgets. I’m still getting started and I have three kids interested in this too.

I like the method they use on their website and other similar wraps for distributing the load on the tree. It does make me wonder if it’s better to stack the passes side-by-side or spread several inches apart. It seems side-by-side would be similar to using a strap.

Thanks

I thought about that too. However, Amsteel has such a great weight-to-strength ratio that it sort of defeats the purpose. If you use smaller Amsteel, like Zing-it or even Dynaglide, the diameter is so small that to braid/weave to an appropriate thickness to distribute the weight around the tree, you’d end up using a lot of cord.

Another line I was looking at is Dacron. This polyester line doesn’t stretch, it’s UV-resistant, and is rated at 250+ lbs (113+ kg).

Doing a 4-strand weave with Dacron would be a great alternative to 550 cord.