Seems sensiable to me. I am going to take a hacksaw to the rail on my viper and vwala, an openshot upper part of my stand. I'd rather do this to my summit than spend another 200 bucks on a bushmaster openshot.

Altering a tree stand is nearly always a bad idea since it can adversely affect the structural integrity . If you want a bow hunting stand that badly then save up and buy one . A 15-20 foot tumble to the ground saves nothing .

Don't Alter or Drill holes on Treestands!

altering tree stands is a bad idea there made to hold weight if you take one of the points that is suposed to hold the weight it could mean bad things... just buy your self a cheap 100.00 stand and put it up they have the ones you can take the rails off....

I had to alter one of my Rivers Edge hang ons stands the day that I bought it. I was assembling the stand and got to hooking the cable supports up and noticed some thing was terribly wrong. THE CABLES WERE TOOOOOOOO LONG!! This was a brand new stand. So instead of waiting for the proper cables to arrive I did some precise measuring with top of the line calipers and figures and drilled 2 new holes exact size of the original maufactures. Now my cables were perfect and the stand mounts to trees perfectly level. After I was done I took the stand back to the Pro Shop I purchased it from and showed Dave what I had done to the stand make it work properly. He pulled another stand exactly same as the one I purchased that day adn we measured the cables. They were the same legnth, we thought he had a bad batch come through. We did some more examining and found that the original holes in my stand didnt match the ones on the new one, but the holes I drilled matched EXACT!!!! The stand must not have been placed correctly in the press during maufacturing. Anyway I filled the original wholes with JBWeld and voila!!!! Just like new.