Black Diamond: the dangers of modifying climbing hardwear

It's not surprising to hear a manufacturer asking its users not to modify their climbing hardware, but it is interesting to hear why. Black Diamond have written an interesting article about the various modifications that they are often asked about; re-slinging cams with extender slings, using a screamer between you and your ice axes to hold a fall, swapping the bails on your crampons. They carried out tests on each of these - and generally the result is not ideal; with failures at relatively low loads.

Image from Black Diamond

Edelrid Mirco Jul and Mega Jul belay devices

An interesting new pair of belay devices from Edelrid - the Micro Jul (for narrow ropes) and Mega Jul are assisted braking device which can also be used in 'guide mode' where two seconds can be brought up at the same time. It looks like there's a fairly easy way to lower fallen seconds when on guide mode too. It appears to be similar to the Mammut Smart in the way its assisted braking works, so it will be interesting to see if it also suffers from the awkward rope-feeding.

EDELRID Micro Jul & Mega Jul EN from EDELRID on Vimeo.

Petzl Laser Speed Light ice screw

One of the more interesting of Petzl's latest product announcements is the Petzl Laser Light Speed ice screw - a screw with an aluminium main body and a steel tip. It weighs 100g (for a 17cm screw) and has a folding handle. The older Laser Sonic weighs 185g for a 17cm screw, while a Black DIamond Express weighs 145g even with a slightly shorter length at 16cm. I would be interested to see exactly how they have made the connection between the two types of metal, because seamlessly joining steel and aluminium has in the past been a bit of an engineering challenge.

Image from UKC

1972 Chouinard Equipment Catalogue

A fascinating piece of history: the 1972 Chouinard Catalogue has all kinds of interesting snippets and historical info.

Cover of the 1972 Chouinard Catalogue (image from Black Diamond)

The history part of the Patagonia website is also very interesting.

Rope innovation: Mammut Sensor, Edelrid Snipe, Beal Unicore

There several interesting developments coming over the next year. The Mammut Sensor has middle and end markings which you can feel with your grip as well as see. According to this article at the Gear Caster, Mammut uses thicker yarn on these identifier sections.

Mammut Sensor rope (Image from the Gear Caster)

The Edelrid Snipe has a larger 10mm diameter near its ends (7m on each end) so that you can feel when the ends are approaching. It also means that the ends should be a bit more hard wearing - which is clever because that's the bit which usually wears out first.

Edelrid Snipe (image from the Gear Caster)

Beals Unicore ropes basically have the sheath glued to the core. They say this prevents slippage when the sheath is cut or abraded, reduces shrinkage due to water submersion, and allows the rope to be cut to length without a heated knife. Preventing sheath slippage is particularly useful when ascending - normally if a sheath is damaged on a fixed line it can make it difficult or impossible to ascend, Unicore aims to reduce this. There's more info on the Beal website.

Beal Unicore (image from Beal)

There's also a interesting idea coming from Beal - related to the Unicore technology; that if rope is more slick and supple, it affects the ease of use and handling more than simply reducing weight and diameter. The BMC suggests this may mean we'll see a change in the trend towards thinner and thinner ropes.

Sirocco helmet from Petzl

The new Sirocco helmet from Petzl is moulded from expanded polypropylene EPP (as opposed to the more usual expanded polystyrene EPS) which has enabled them to create the helmet as a 'monobloc'. That is, it is  formed as a single component rather than the usual layered structure of an EPS foam inner with a polycarbonate shell. It is superlight at 165g (for comparison the Petzl Meteor III weighs 235g and is one of the lightest helmets currently available). It also has a very nifty looking magnetic buckle - which they say you can clip with one hand. Here's a video from UKC at the Outdoor Show 2012:

UKC/UKH at OutDoor 2012 - Petzl Scirocco Helmet from UKClimbing.com TV on Vimeo.

Choosing the right carabiner

Black Diamond director of quality, Kolin Powick, has written a great article on carabiners; it talks about rock climbing crabs vs industrial crabs and why they don't recommend using one type for the other activity. He also carried out some tests on 'workhorse' crabs vs lightweight crabs using a drop tower. It's interesting to see that the lightweight crabs actually tended to deform and become unusable, whereas in the same tests the heavy duty crabs remained usable.

Image from Black Diamond

New cam from Black Diamond: X4

Black Diamond have revealed a new 'large expansion range' small cam family called the X4. The most interesting part is the axle - which is offset. That is, the axle protrudes from a different place on each side of the cam hub. This is probably best explained in this video from UKC:

Making furniture out of climbing rope: Seilfaktur

Seilfaktur is a Design Project created by Angelika Hess - creating furniture out of spent climbing ropes. Apparently she is based in  Rosenheim near the Alps - and decided to create this furniture after wondering what happens to all the ropes after they can no longer can be used.

More at Core77 and Inhabitat or at the creators website: http://seilfaktur.de/

Images from http://seilfaktur.de/

How long do slings and quickdraws last?

Another interesting article from the Black Diamond Quality Control Lab - this time looking at slings and quickdraws. They used a bunch of different sling materials and did some pull tests to see how strong they were after they had been abraded, and also how strong they were after being loaded to 5kN 1000 times (to simulate in-situ gear that's taken a lot of falls), and 11kN cycled until failure.

Image from Black Diamond

Those slings that made it through the abrasion test didn't actually loose that much strength in general, but some slings broke during the abrasion cycling. Loading to 5kN 1000 times seemed to have almost no influence on strength, loading to 11kN produced unpredictable results.

They also mention that one previous finding was that int-situ slings seem to loose most strength in the first 10 weeks of being exposed - although this finding didn't agree some some other results.

Metolius Master Cam failure - cam stop broken

Count Chockula in the mountinaproject.com forums writes: "This #0 rarely gets placed and has never been hung on or taken a single fall, but one of the cam stops has completely sheared off the lobe." The post is old (May 2011) but interesting. Metolious replaced the cam and have apparently made changes to the design since then.

Image from  Count Chockula in the mountinaproject.com forums

In an apparently separate incident, another forum user Alan Ream shows a photo of his Master Cam, which also has broken cam stops.  He shows it side by side with the newer design of stops - which appear to be slightly larger and no longer adjacent to grooves in the camming surface. Users speculated that the proximity of the stops to the grooves could have contributed to the failures.

Image from  Alan Ream on mountainproject.com forums

Unusual carabiners: Rock Exotica Bi-wire, Petzl Ange, Kong Ergo Wire

I haven't used any of these, but they all look interesting. The Rock Exotica Bi-Wire is strong (30, 10, 9 kN), heavy (67g), but most unusually - it has two gates. The inner gate opens inwardly and the outer gate opens outwardly. It looks like it might take some getting used to clipping it, and wouldn't really be suitable for use in a quickdraw, maybe as a more secure clip to an anchor?

Image from CMC Rescue

Next is a Petzl Ange, which has been out since last year but doesn't seem to be widely distributed in UK stores. It has a single pronged wire gate (they call it a Monofil) rather than the normal 'looped' wire gate which means it's quite light (28g). For me, I like the idea of a single prong because it cant get tangled up like a normal wire gate - when carrying a full rack I've sometimes found wires from nuts, or the wire gate from another carabiner, can get jammed quite badly in between the nose of a wire gate carabiner. This is very difficult to solve when hanging on with one hand, and can make it impossible to place any nuts because it completely disables the gate.

Image from Petzl

Last is the Kong Ergo Wire which has an 'ergonomic' plastic grip on the wire and a via ferreta style locking device.

Imamge from Kong