All About Suspension Rigs
Want to buy or build one? Here’s the sweet and low-down:
Best Bang For Your Buck: Bonds of Steel Tripod Topper
For $225, you get the top component for a tripod. By selling the top alone, they’re able to keep shipping costs down; then, you simply buy steel pipes at your local hardware store.
Best Complete Package: Bonds of Steel Portable Rig
An entire rig for $500, with lightweight aluminum legs that break apart for easy transportation. If you have the money to drop, I’ve heard nothing but good things about this one.
But I’m broke as a joke! I’ll just put a hook in the ceiling…
I’ve looked into this one at length. Odds are, you can’t create a trustworthy suspension point in a home without opening up the ceiling and building reinforcement into the joists.
DO NOT drill straight up and put in a hook. That method creates a single point of failure (that’s bad) and it pulls straight down in the direction of highest vulnerability. You need something capable of supporting dynamic load at a Safety Ratio acceptable for trusting a human life.
So again, don’t even think about it. It’s not at all unlikely the bottom will fall on their head and die, and you’ll end up explaining to the cops why you have a sexy nude tied up corpse in your living room.
What about the rig we see in your photos?
I have a homemade rig created from steel pipes intended for plumbing, held together with elbows and T-joints.
All rigs have to balance cost, stability, size, and weight. I put together mine for dirt cheap ($120), it’s very reasonably stable, and it has a huge A-frame which is very photo-friendly.
As a result, I sacrificed HEAVILY on weight and portability. My rig requires a pair of pipe wrenches for setup and breakdown, and it weighs over a hundred pounds.
So unless you share both my extreme poverty and near-obsessive preoccupation with rope suspensions, I wouldn’t really recommend attempting to duplicate it.