Homemade portaledge
And affortable Alternative.
Forward
Rock climbing portaledges are essentially glorafied cots, yet they cost an incredable amount of money. Why? Probobly due to them being a veary neiche peice of gear that people that do use one, might only buy one in their whole climbing career. How expensive are we talking? Around $800 for a single and $1000 for a double wide ledge, not incudeing the rain fly, which will run you around $400. Incredable. So what did mine run me? around $200 for the ledge and rain fly, keep in mind this is not indludeing the price of the sewing machine, but eaven so, it would only be $400 with that price included.
Preface
This projct had anouther goal other than being cheap, I wanted to constucted it out of the most rudementry tools posible, I wanted to design it in a way that any joe-shamo could go to HomeDepot with $200 and a eavning off and end up with a funcional portaledge, while moast of this project is posible this way, the one thing I could not figure out, that caused me to cave and use a sewing machine, was the main peice of fabric on the bottom, originaly I tried and tried again to make a tarp and paracord to work, but due to the material that a tarp was made of, it simply did not work, it was not strong enough and every time I weighted it, it would undergo plastic elongation, it basically funtioned veary simaler to how streching a groshery bag works. I'm sure there is a way to tie knots in the nylon fabric I used for the bottom in a way that would midagate the need for sewing.
Prodotipe design
Testing tensile strength of heavy duty tarp from HomeDepot. I was also testing ways of ataching paracord to the tarp, in the end I had to abandon this because tarps are simply to week.
Final Design
Rainfly Design
The rainfly is made of light duty 12'x20' from home depot.
PVC frame
The PVC frame is made out of 1 1/2 in. PVC pipes confitured in the way pictured below, so when dissasembled you end up with 7 3 1/2 peices, the PVC is held together with PVC cement.
simaler to an actual portaledge, the nyalon base has to be tentioned somehow after assembleing as to prevent it sagging too mutch, this is done with 3 sets of webbing cam buckles.