Asana Elite Kit Review

We’ve seen the Asana Elite Slackline Kit on the market for a number of years, so we were curious to see how it all works. This kit features 30 feet of military spec nylon webbing, a ratchet, hardware and a 12-foot tree sling to be used for removing the ratchet once the line is tight. It is a complete kit, including tree padding.

Likes
We like that this kit comes with good old military spec webbing. This webbing has the most classic, stretchy, gently bouncy feel. Military spec webbing is what Slacklining was born on and we think its super cool that Asana is selling a kit that includes this type of webbing.

We really like that Asana sells this kit with tree padding. This is a commonly-neglected component of slackline kits, so it’s refreshing to see a company taking this seriously enough to include it in their kits.

Dislikes
In our first attempts to rig this line, we were unable to get it tight enough to keep a 135 lb. slacker off the ground in the middle of the line. The anchors were a reasonable three and a half feet off the ground, but we simply could not get enough tension on the line.

We found this whole setup to be particularly dangerous both with rigging and de-rigging the line. The ratchet tweaked my wrist on my first attempt at rigging this line and, on the second attempt, it slammed into my leg, bruising it pretty badly.

With this system, the ratchet coils the anchor instead of the line. This is a cool idea, in theory, because it prevents the walking line from being damaged by the ratchet. However, it is far from functional. The instructions tell you to tension the line with the ratchet, then attach the sling to take the force of the line in place of the ratchet. If you don’t plan it all out perfectly, the recoil of the line will cause the ratchet to fly through the air at very high velocity.

Asana sells this kit with one-inch-wide webbing and a two-inch-wide ratchet (see image above). This causes major off-axis coiling of the webbing, and in every instance of detensioning it causes damage to the slackline. This setup is particularly dangerous because it coils the anchor. If the anchor were to break, the heavy ratchet would go hurling through the air.

As for quality, the Asana Elite Slackline kit sits at the bottom of the list. The sewn ends of the line and anchor are not true bartacks. They’re just a zig-zag stitching, slapped together without even taking the time to reset the sewing machine for each stitch. The “carabiners” are nothing but hardware store quick clips. They have sharp edges that can snag and damage the slackline and are guaranteed to take skin off your fingers.