Dragonfly ll saddle failure

[startopper]

Thought some of you might find this interesting or have feedback. I noticed this fray, well really more like complete failure of a stitch on my Dragonfly ll saddle that is slightly less than two years old. The day before I noticed this I was about 50 feet up in the saddle doing some pretty hairy stuff. The picture of me climbing is day 1, day 2 never happened because of the failure. I'm glad it didn't fail completely on day one, I might not be writing this. Granted my bridge would still have been supported by the D ring and it's stitching on my side and I wouldn't have just fallen out of the tree by any means. You can see in the picture I had two main high lines and a 15ft lanyard all secure. But even an unplanned body shift of a few inches can never be good when you have a running chain saw. Well I'm still waiting to hear back from Sherill Tree so I'll keep you updated as to what they think of this. I mean there's only a single line of stitching there, seems like a bad and dangerous design, don't you think?

 

[lumberjack333]

Buddy of mine climbs on a dragonfly II - I'll have to show him this. Thanks for sharing, good luck with the "warranty"

 

[startopper]

here's the same tree different view

upper right hand corner

 

[imagineero]

Sounds like it's a good time for us all to pull our harnesses out and give them a *real* inspection, not the kind we do each morning while trying to get a coffee down ;-) I'm going downstairs to look mine over now. Would be good for us all to give our harnesses a proper gong over, lift padding out of the way, check all the stitching, inside and out etc. Give a shout of if you did it!

Shaun

 

[imagineero]

Took less time than what I figured. Checked out my treemotion, all clear. Pulled off all the padding, moved the buckles out a little to check where the webbing sits on them, checked the webbing around the D's. All good. I should probably replace my bridge sometime soon though, it's been there a long time.

Shaun

 

[Pelorus]

My Sierra Moreno Mercantile Co saddle was built to last several generations. A tad on the heavy side, but I remember Don Blair telling me that if you drive a 5 ton truck, why do you need a 3 pound saddle?