Greenlake pulleys test

I bought a pulley setup from SBI. Overall, I was pretty unhappy with the experience. I paid for 2 day shipping through their web site, and within a day their site showed the order status as “shipped.” After three weeks I emailed them to ask “what the heck?” and was sent a response about how they had just “moved offices” and it would go out the next day. Riiiiight. So, anyway, after feeling jerked around for a few weeks, my pulley system finally came.  It’s not that they took three weeks, it’s that their site is disingenuous (saying “order shipped”), and their excuse was obviously fake.  I’ve been very happy with Slackline Express, despite the fact that Joe isn’t always lightning fast, because he is upfront about the fact that many products are made to order and if you need your item shipped quicker than “in a few business days from now” to be explicit and he’ll see what he can do.  In this case, the item was clearly already made (I waited to order until after the pullies came back into stock), and simply needed to be put in a box.  If they are too busy with day jobs to do that promptly, they should be upfront about that.  The summers in Seattle are short, and I took three weeks off from slacklining because of these knuckleheads misleading me, ugh.

It rigs pretty easily as a 5:1, and I added two climbing pulleys for a 7:1 effective ratio.

I took 165 feet of silver Sterling climb-spec (‘smooth’) 1″ and threaded it with 165 feet of 9/16″ red Sterling tubular. I chose a bright inner color so that if the outer layer becomes worn anywhere, hopefully I will see the red “peeking through” and know my line is not up to rated strength anymore. This was the first time I’ve threaded a line, and using a technique shown on Youtube, as well as talked about on the slackline.com forums. My first attempt I actually got 3/4 of the way through threading a 200ft mil-spec line before I noticed the “needle” I was using to thread actually was separating the weave in a way that seems dangerous to me. I’ll write an article maybe about what I’ve learned of how to properly thread a slackline, but basically I believe a lot of people using the common technique are actually weakening their line in the process. I started over using the climb spec (denser weave) and being a LOT more careful, and all went well.

I thought a threaded 165 foot line with a pulley system left in would give me weeks of trouble, but I actually walked it first attempt. The biggest hassle is just getting the line tight.. once it’s up, it’s cake. I’ll be threading a 300ft line soon.

Also, the image above was taken in Greenlake Park, just north west of the 5 way intersection. There are several trees there good for either 20-40ft spans, or 140-200ft spans. Here is my attempt at a google map link, the trees dead center in this map are the ones of interest.