Pros:
- Affordable
- Fairly simple and straight-forward setup
- The brake is nice
- It seems quite safe
- We have a happy son who is able to ride a new 120 ft zipline in our back yard
Cons:
- The provided instructions are poor. Of note, they don't clearly identify the desired rise/run for safe operation, which is pretty critical to safe setup/operation. You'll likely need to experiment a bit - too much rise/run and you'll come into the end of the zipline run with too much speed and bounce up violently, risking injury. Too little rise/run and lighter users will get stuck in the middle. Additionally, they don't identify how far from the tree at the end of the zipline run to set the cable attachment bolts. It's pretty straight forward - set them far enough from the tree that no one will hit the tree when stopping, but it should be called out explicitly, because there's pretty serious risk of injury if they're set too close to the tree and someone hits it at high speed.
- The turnbuckle provided for tensioning is quite small (it provides about 6 inches of tensioning), so you have to get the line very tight by hand before tensioning, which was a bit difficult for us - that much cable is heavy! In hindsight, using a ratcheting system to tighten the cable would have been simpler and more effective.
- The provided cable attachment bolts are small - in our initial tensioning, one broke, so we ended up just replacing them all with a higher quality bolts - for us, it was just too important we know that no one smacks into the tree at the end of the zipline run to take any risks.