Improved Sidekick

[Sunrise Guy]

For those of you who have had the same frustrations as I have had with using the Sidekick, a nice gizmo for retrieving and hanging lines while aloft, I offer these pics of my improvements. I bought the hook attached to a hanging pole that department stores use to hang and retrieve clothes high up on display walls. The larger dog snap I got at HD. I simply sawed off the old, tiny hook, puttied in some J-B Weld epoxy, scored the sides of the new hook with a hacksaw about four inches down to improve adhesion, cut the new hook off at about five inches and then set it. Twelve hours later it was good to go. I can now hang lines overhead with ease. The line never comes sliding back down to me and never falls off the hook, as before with the tiny hook. I have great respect for the Sidekick's inventor, don't get me wrong. He e-mailed me when I complained about the trouble I was having, and he is a good guy. I just needed to tweak his invention to get it to work well for me. If my tweaks help anybody else, cool. If you have a good time with your Sidekick, as is, cool.

 

[Fireaxman]

For those of you who have had the same frustrations as I have had with using the Sidekick,....

Yes, I've had the problem with the hook and bead. The little bead with the velcro just isn't quite enough to hold 18 feet of 1/2" rope at the sometimes near horizontal angles I have to use to get the rope where I want it. My solution looks a lot like yours, but I went at it a little differently. I took the bead off the existing hook and bent a piece of copper tubing to fit over it. Cant remember the diameter of the copper tubing, but the tip of the existing hook fit inside it nicely. Then I just silver soldered it in place.

I'm pretty much addicted to the Sidekick. Using a throwline inside the canopy to reposition my TIP just earns me bruised knuckles and tangled throwlines. Amazing how often that 9 feet the Sidekick gives me is just enough, but with the upturned hook on my modified tip I can actually throw a rope or weight a couple more feet, kind of like like using a pool cue. I too talked to Tim about it, but I understand why it might not be economicly feasable for him to modify the tips the way I did. I guess it took me about 30 minutes of fooling with it to get what I wanted.

In defense of Tim's original design, the bead and velcro work pretty well with throw line and weight bag rings. Its just that I prefer to handle the rope directly and skip the intermediate throwline step.