Indoor Slackline

As winter starts to sprinkle snow onto my small town in Michigan, it’s becoming a little cold outside for me to slackline.  As a sport where I usually like to be in a tshirt, shorts, and no shoes, it feels a little bulky to be bundled up and trying to balance.  As a result, my dad and I figured out a way to mount my slackline in the basement.  Now this may seem like an easy task at first thought, but we quickly found out that it wasn’t going to be.   This was largely due to us spanning it between two walls instead of anchoring it to the ground and putting a-frames in between.  At one end, we had a u-barlatch that was bolted to a 2x4, with a metal plate on the other side.  We then beefed this end up by nailing in more 2x4 pieces.  This side squeaks occasionally, but has held true since we put it in.  On the other hand, the other wall we had to attach to had cement behind the drywall.  We initially set four concrete anchors to screw the u-bar latch to, each rated at 700 pounds.  While four of these don’t add up to the recommended 5000 pounds, we thought that a short line, mounted low to the ground, and used just for walking would be alright.  A loud pop from that end of the line proved otherwise while I was walking. After replacing these with four rated at 1200 pounds, I now haven’t had any problems.

picture form personal collection