Falling on static ropes is dangerous they say. It sounds painful, but how painful? We tested semi-static nylon rope, a very static polyester rope and a high-tech super static abrasion-resistant rope on the drop tower. Disclaimer: Don't lead with a static rope. It is dangerous and could stop you so fast it breaks you, the rope or just straight up kills you. I guess if the rope broke you die either way. So why would we test this? I've had my dynamic rope get stuck where two ropes were required to rappel and my other rope was static. To exit a canyon up a vertical/steep side Some alpine climbing situations where only a skinny static rope is available The wrong rope was mailed and you didn't realize it was static! We have an EPISODE about that happening with a dirty return at Dicks Sporting Goods. What's Normal? Climbing at the gym or on a 1 pitch sport route can generate around 2kN on the climber and 4kN at the anchor. See our GYM FALLS EPISODES about that. The highest force we got so far is with a 290lb guy falling with the belay device bolted to the wall and he got 4.44kN and the anchor saw 7.16kN. This is all with a dynamic rope that absorbs the force and these forces are super good enough for you and your gear. Fall Factors? Not all falls are created equal. How far you fall is irrelevant, as long as you don't hit the ground. Falling 3 feet can be super dangerous if you only have 2 feet of rope between you and what's catching you. That is a fall factor FF1.5 (3/2). A 10 foot fall in a gym with 30 feet of rope going up to the quickdraw and back down to your belayer is a FF0.33 and that is why it is soft. Where can you get a FF1 or FF2? Starting pitch 2 where you can fall past your belayer OR having a personal anchor that you get too high on and drop hard onto it. The only thing you have to worry about when you start on the ground is the ground. Your FF is super safe enough. We get some gnar forces with just a FF0.3 testing these static ropes but remember if you got a FF1 it gets more than gnar. If you fell just 3 feet but only had 3 feet in the system it's just as bad as having fallen 20 feet with 20 feet of rope in the system. It doesn't matter. It's all the same FF1 and when we did test a FF1 we literally broke the rope. Our Test We dropped a 200 lb weight from 4 feet above the last "protection" to simulate a lead fall with the climber's last piece just below their feet. The GriGri belay device was bolted to the post at the bottom to have some consistency though it was a non-dynamic belay making the force higher than if a person belayed it. We estimate that 25 feet of rope was out and the weight fell 8ft. That makes the estimated fall factor ~0.32x. The Ropes we tested were: Nylon Dynamic 9.8mm Nylon Beal Spelenium 10.0mm Semi-Static with half of the dynamic rope's stretch Polyester Imlay Canyonero 9.2mm Static AF with 1/4 of the dynamic rope's stretch Technora Sterling Canyon C-IV 9.0 static rope with 1/3 the dynamic rope's stretch Results 10% Supports HowNOT2 Climbing, Caving and Canyon gear here How can you mitigate risk if forced to use a static rope as a lead rope? Place gear immediately and often after leaving the belay Give a dynamic belay (use a belay device that can slip and jump when catching the climber) Assume you'll die and you are just getting the rope fixed for the follower See What Hz For years, some viewers have complained that our dynamometer doesn't refresh fast enough to capture peak force. The Line Scale 2 in fast mode was only reading at 40hz or 40x per second. When we built the drop tower, we got an S-beam Load cell that can read at 10,000 Hz! These falls gave us insight into how fast the refresh rate needs to be in order to capture the peak force. We counted the number of refreshes that captured our peak force and divided that number by 10,000. If we only got 4 cells on our spreadsheet that showed the peak force, we would need 10,000 / 4 =.2,500Hz to capture accurate data. If our peak force was consistent over 180 cells, then 10k/180 means 56hz would have given us accurate data How many hertz do you need to capture a 0.3 fall factor fall on a dynamic rope? 23! This validates the gym fall experiments we did in the past! However, for the semi-static ropes in a 0.3 fall factor fall we needed 36-85hz and when we did the fall factor one with our most static rope, we needed 550 hz. Luckily, being aware how a faster load cell could help, we steered the design of the LineScale3 to read at 1280Hz making it the fastest all in one load cell on the market. You can get our exclusive discount code on our GEAR page if you want to do your own experiments. What's Next If climbing gear blows, does it at least help slow you down???

Petzl has SOME holes in their Sm'D and Spirt carabiners so can you drill holes in yours to save weight? Elliott Bernhagen sent me a few carabiners with a LOT of holes in them to see if they were super good enough. The Sm'D carabiner's hole is intended for a keeper sling to keep your microtraxion or tibloc from falling when you are installing it. See ALPINE SAVVY's article about that. The Spirit carabiner was a marketing trick more than it was a weight-saving trick. The Edelrid Nineteen G carabiner is the lightest full-strength carabiner available and weighs 19.5 grams. Elliott drilled almost 20 holes in it and only saved 1.1grams or about 5% of its weight, BUT we got around half of it's rated strength of 20kN. I don't know if that is worth it? OUR RESULTS Edelrid Nineteen G - 20kN MBS - 12.79kN Edelrid Nineteen G - 20kN MBS - 13.44kN Camp Nano - 21kN MBS - 7.76kN Camp Nano - 21kN MBS - 11.75kN Camp Photon - 22kN MBS - 10.53kN 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get light carabiners here To give context, Elliott does this to carabiners that see very little force. Carabiners, ascender eye keeper biners, ascender biners, etc. Things that rarely ever see 1kN. But if you do this to 20 carabiners, you only save enough the weight of the one Nineteen G carabiner. Then you are carrying an 18.4gram carabiner you can't use for the stuff you need bomber carabiners for. What's Next See our Carabiner show down videos to see which one lasted the longest

Ever get to an old hanger while climbing and wonder how strong it is? Bobby got his hands on recalled hangers, death hangers, niche hangers, discontinued hangers and we broke them all. A total of 27 tests. Some were old hangers that have never placed and others had been on the wall for 44 years. These include SMC "death" hangers and Leeper Hangers, recalled because they were so susceptible to SCC (stress crack corrosion) and could break under body weight. We have learned as a community that stainless steel hangers (for environments that don't need Titanium), made of thicker stock, are way better. Our Results 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get your climbing, caving, or canyon gear here to support us. Leeper hangers were the first widely available commercial hanger. They were eventually recalled because they corroded quickly. Our tests showed the Leeper hangers we tested were super strong enough but there are Leeper hangers out there in much worse shape. Ed Leeper SMC did not recall their hangers made from the 70s and early 80s, but redesigned them. You can tell it's an older one because the SMC logo is horizontal and slightly thinner than the newer vertical logos which are super safe enough. All of our old, weird, funky hangers broke at much higher forces than climbers will ever generate in a normal fall. So should we trust old hangers? Maybe. We are more concerned about old bolts in the rock that are impossible to inspect. How well the bolt was originally placed, its age, the climatic conditions of the area, and corrosion are just some of the factors that play into this equation. The problem with some bolt hangers is they only allowed for 5/16 (8mm) or 1/4" (6mm) bolts making the hanger stronger than a bolt. And consider that most of what we tested wasn't very corroded. In an ideal climbing scenario, you want the bolt to be the strongest part of a system. Overbuilt if you will bc it needs to withstand time, the elements and untracked use. Your personal gear can be weaker as it is is easy to inspect and replace when worn. What's Next? We broke other old hangers in this episode.

Don't fall on teeth, because I did it for you .Toothed devices are intended to be progress captures up a climbing rope or in a complex pulley system. If you get a high enough force, it can desheath your rope and possibly cut through it. Petzl says that happens at 4kN and we did some human testing to find out if that is true. Understand WHERE The Risk Is There are two (becoming more common) use cases where people are actually climbing up a rock while using micro traxions as belay devices. In top rope soloing you have the rope prefixed to the anchor up top and you slide the micro traxion up as you climb. In belaying a follower, you may use this rather than an atc in guide mode or a grigri as those can wear your arms out. If you are new to belaying, DON'T use this as a belay device until you are proficient at the other methods, have experience in what happens in the real world, and can very quickly convert it to a lowering system, in an emergency, as the teeth only let the rope go in one direction. You may be attentive to belaying your partner up to you until the last few feet because the last section is a little easier, they are right there, they want to get to the anchor so they go a lot faster all of a sudden, but this is where all the risk is. You can fall 10 feet on the micro traxion.... IF YOU HAVE A LOT OF ROPE IN THE SYSTEM. If you are standing on a ledge at the anchor and you have 5 feet of slack in the system, you have a HUGE chance of cutting through your rope if you fall, even if it doesn't "feel" as dangerous. Human Testing I was "top roping" on a 9.8 Boa Dynamic Climbing rope being belayed by Sylvester Jakubowski with a Petzl Micro Traxion, which he donated new for all of our human and lab testing. I had about 50 feet of rope in the system and fell 10, 15, and then 20 feet and got 1.97kN, 2.71kN and 3.45kN which was not enough to desheath the rope. Fall factor is how far you fall compared to how much rope you have in the system. If I want more force, I need to fall further with the same amount of rope or go up higher and fall the same amount with less rope. Since that is where the risk actually is, short falls near the anchor, we did our next tests up higher. My first fall was not even 10 feet but I generated 3.24kN which was the same as my biggest fall further down. My 2nd "bigger" fall was maybe only 15 feet and I got 4.5kN. My rope did NOT desheath at 4kN like Petzl says in their warnings. Shortfalls near the anchor, similar to an aggressive bounce test on a big wall, produced up to 3kN. Even if I don't desheath it at 4kN, your body starts to hurt past that so we did the rest of the tests at the lab. Lab Results We used a 200lb weight on the drop tower and tested the Nano and Micro on Dynamic and Static rope. On the slow pull machine we did the same but also a 9.2 polyester static canyon rope, and 6mm accessory cord. We used an ascender to compare because it has a longer tooth section like the pro traxion. Buying Guide Pro, Micro and Nano are the three options by Petzl. Protraxion is 5x heavier than the nano but it's also way way easier to haul with. The micro and pro both have a locking feature to keep the toothed cam permanently up while using it as a pulley only or installing a rope. Nano's are intended more for super light weight mountaineering. Micro is better for belaying or top rope soloing and can also be used if hauling 75lbs or less on a big wall. Pro traxion is better for big heavy hauls. Buying a traxion at Extreme Gear and donations is the only way we are able to make this content. 10% Supports HowNOT2 Extreme Gear sells all three Traxions What's Next Shockloading near your anchor is a huge risk of high forces. We also did some human testing to find out what really happens.

What if I gave you ten quick draws, but told you one wasn't going to hold a fall, and you don't get to know which one? Would the dirtbag in you still use them? Many of us have used draws that are over 10 years old and we tested two separate batches where each one had a result lower than the force you may get during a whipper. Thought Experiment Anchors are built strong, redundant, equalized...yada yada... so you can top rope or fix a rope to ascend. That's great, but we should also focus on the one piece of gear that isn't bomber, locking, or redundant and it's the one piece of gear that actually catches you falling! For a fun thought experiment, I cut a nylon and Dyneema quickdraw half way through on one side and pulled on them. We of course wouldn't climb with one of them but they both broke almost 3x stronger than the draws we tested cut with time. What YOU Get - Whipper Forces We have 3 videos dedicated to measuring the force of a climbing fall in a gym setting. Most of these falls were with the feet around the last bolt clipped. More rope does not always mean more force since you have more rope to absorb the fall. Our softest catch with the lightest people saw 2.40kN at the anchor and Tanner, who is 290lbs, had his grigri bolted to the wall and his quickdraw saw 7.19kN. You really do need your climbing gear to hold at least 8kN to have any level of certainty of it working during a fall. What We Got - Our Data Tests we did in 2020 sent to us by Rob Warden Tests we did in 2022 sent to us by Jakob Basler 10% Supports HowNOT2 Get your quick draws here. Quick draw buying guide D shape carabiners are perfect for draws, it keeps the rope and pro lined up with the spine. Wire gates are ideal to have on the rope end so they don't flutter open. The rubber keeper on one side is intended to keep the biner orientated in the right direction after clipping the bolt or pro. Nylon is easier to grab, dyneema is going to be lighter. Large carabiners are way nicer for handling, small carabiners are lighter. Extendable draws are slings doubled up so you can make them longer on the fly. Steel cable draws are intended to be installed as permanent quickdraws as both nylon and dyneema will degrade in the sun and you won't know when they are no longer super good enough. Extreme Gear is a non-profit and supports us 10%, these are only some of their options: Best price AND light - Ceres II Ultralight My favorite - Dyon Express KS Lightest - Nineteen G Set Longest lasting - Bulletproof Extendable draws can be any combination you want on extreme gear, just message John at sales@extremegear.org and he'll put together what you want. What's Next Another concern with permanent draws is that you can get some groovy carabiners. We tested a whole bunch in this episode.