[HN Gopher] Carabiner Collection
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Carabiner Collection
Author : cainxinth
Score : 161 points
Date : 2024-06-18 12:40 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.carabinercollection.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.carabinercollection.com)
| alexjplant wrote:
| When it comes to online catalogs of left-field stuff my favorite
| is the 40 oz Archive [1] (which seems to have renamed itself
| since the last time I checked it almost a decade ago). It's far
| more whimsical and less healthy than this one but is also worth
| perusal if you're bored.
|
| [1] http://www.40ozmaltliquor.com/
| solardev wrote:
| I was expecting a rock climber, not trees :D That's a nice
| surprise.
|
| There's a lot of really cool equipment for climbing, not just
| carabiners but various sorts of brakes, rappelling, anchoring,
| ascending, descending, traversing, etc. - most of which I don't
| understand. I feel like I'm gawking at Batman in awe anytime I'm
| near one of those folks.
|
| It'd be a fun modern-day competition to try to get people to
| scale a castle wall and break into the keep using this gear...
| lukan wrote:
| He seems to be doing both, but with a focus in trees lately.
|
| <'94: lots of off-rope rock and tree climbing 1994:
| participated in my first ropes course event 1996: learned to
| belay 2001: tied my first prusik and first self-belayed climb
| 2006: first trad lead and bought my first full trad rack 2007:
| climbed my first redwood while roped in and ran my first ropes
| course event '07>: been professionally training and leading
| tree climbing and ropes work ever since. "
|
| Both is fun. Also freestyle combinations, there might be a tree
| close to a rock and then one can just use both.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Tree climbing is incredible fun. The devices used are agile,
| and in North America at least, climbing techniques are
| expressive and personalized to the point of still being the
| wild west.
|
| The ISA/TCIA host yearly regional climbing competitions.
| They're going on now. For anyone who hasn't seen what it's like
| for a skilled climber to rip around in a tree, they're open to
| the public, and I can't recommend them enough:
| https://www.itcc-isa.com/events/calendar
| solardev wrote:
| Neat! Looks like there's one coming up in Seattle. Might have
| to drive up for that.
|
| Can public audience members just show up out of the blue
| (wander out of the woods?) or do we have to sign up or buy a
| ticket ahead of time? Not going to climb, just watch and clap
| giddily.
| oasisbob wrote:
| They're typically hosted in public parks, no tickets
| required. It's always fun to see the reaction of people who
| stumble onto them.
|
| The masters climbs at the end of the event are the most
| exciting.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Years back I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens with a date
| and stumbled upon an Arborist competition happening. I knew of
| the word Arborist but was ignorant of what that entailed and
| wound up learning a lot.
|
| The competition had an Arborist get their climbing line strung
| up and anchored, climb the tree to touch 5 flags dispersed
| around the tree within a set time limit. The flagged branches
| had bells tied to them so they had to be nimble as well as
| fast. Touching a flag earned them points and ringing a bell
| cost them points. Of course one flag was located far out on a
| thin branch making it very difficult to reach without ringing
| the bell. They also had to do no damage to the tree in the
| process.
|
| It was very interesting and I was talking to one of the
| competitors who explained their profession and how they travel
| around climbing trees for a variety of reasons from forestry
| and conservation to basic tree pruning. They are also required
| to be certified and that is handeled by the International
| Society of Arboriculture (I.S.A.) He also mentioned "target
| pruning" which is a term I was unaware of so I learned
| something. It certainly seems like an interesting and fun
| profession. I need to hire one to check out my big oak that is
| in need of a trim.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of the impressive collection of ascent and
| descent devices by Gary Storrick:
|
| http://www.verticalmuseum.com/VerticalDevicesPage/Ascenders....
|
| It dropped offline for a while, was afraid it was gone for good.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Oh, wow - thank you! Looking at the evolution of the Jumars in
| that is fascinating -- you can see them go from really clunky
| prototypes to looking like a modern ascender.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| I love the stark admission of this
|
| > "... plus I'm not one to toss aside a carabiner even if it's a
| little boring."
|
| I love when people just embrace their nonsense and go all in on
| it. There is just such joy in other peoples passion!!!
| Bluestein wrote:
| > There is just such joy in other peoples passion!!!
|
| Agreed :)
|
| (And joy in other people's passion might just be the antidote
| for the "rage at other people's thought" that seems to be
| becoming the norm these days ...)
| red_admiral wrote:
| I miss the old "bayonet lock" ones, like on this page - they
| don't make them anymore. The special thing about them was they
| were "bistable" in both the locked and the unlocked positions,
| whereas twistlocks these days automatically go into the locked
| position if you let go of them. For the obvious counter-argument,
| that you can forget to lock them: that's true of screw gates as
| well, and yet we still use them.
| calebm wrote:
| What is your single favorite carabiner - like if all others were
| going to be destroyed and you could only use one for the rest of
| your life?
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| A steel oval auto locking keylock 38kN carabiner.
| (https://www.amazon.com/PETZL-OXAN-Carabiner-Black-Triact-
| Loc...) Very strong, fails gradually, optimal loading and
| alignment, secure, doesn't catch on things, wide enough for
| most uses.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| I'm not a climber but I love the Omega Pacific D non-locking
| carabiner, it's size and shape makes it fit through molle
| webbing on Goruck backpacks nicely so it sits flush and is a
| convenient place to attach random things as needed.
| 83 wrote:
| They're expensive but I'm a big fan of the Magnetron series by
| Black Diamond. Self locking yet quick to open, but most
| importantly for me they don't jam up with sand like the screw
| lock/twist lock ones when I'm canyoneering.
| petsfed wrote:
| From a climbing standpoint? Either the Black Diamond Hoodwire
| (now discontinued, and I'll guard my stock with my life) or any
| member of the Black Diamond Rocklock family tree.
|
| From a general usage standpoint, Trango used to make a wiregate
| called the Classic Wiregate. It wasn't as easy to clip as the
| Hoodwire, but it was more symmetric, so you could use it for
| carabiner brakes and things of that nature. It was my go-to
| utility carabiner, but since it wasn't as flashy as crabs meant
| specifically for the rope end of a quickdraw, it never sold
| well enough and so they took it off the market. Turns out that
| a purely functional, no-frills carabiner couldn't compete with
| objectively worse carabiners (the Black Diamond Light D, or ugh
| the Omega Pacific Doval) because it didn't look as "classic".
|
| Many manufacturers make terrifyingly small full-strength
| carabiners, but my experience with them is that they are so
| small that they're difficult to operate, so I have a surprising
| number of effectively keychain carabiners that are actually
| rated for climbing usage.
|
| Sidebar, for life-saving equipment, climbers are bizarrely
| obsessed with how cool things look. The parenthetically
| mentioned Doval was a terrible carabiner, but it looked kind of
| neat, like a classic car with modern influences. It had an
| ovalized _exterior_ , but a D-shaped interior, so it had all
| the clippability problems of an oval carabiner (can you
| determine where the gate's axle is, purely by feel, in under a
| second? not on a smooth oval carabiner), while maintaining the
| D's principle weakness (and why oval carabiners remain
| popular): under bodyweight and higher loads, a nearly-correctly
| positioned d-shaped carabiners will shift into the correct
| position, leading to a nerve-wracking drop. Oval carabiners
| will not do this under bodyweight loads (but also might not
| when faced with higher loads, somewhat compromising their
| ultimate strength, which is, because of the design, also
| somewhat lower than a d-shaped crab). When hanging on really
| tenuous anchors, that little drop has caused said anchors to
| fail, so direct-aid climbers have favored oval carabiners, even
| though they tend to be objectively worse carabiners in every
| other respect.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| The biggest noticeable upgrade for me was keylock noses. Smoother
| clipping and unclipping made sketchy leads just a bit more
| tolerable.
| petsfed wrote:
| I thought the pinnacle of this was the hooded wiregates, but I
| guess those are hard to manufacture cheaply, so they've become
| hard to find. I was planning to replace all of my old wiregates
| with BD Hoodwires, and then suddenly you couldn't find them
| anymore.
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(page generated 2024-06-20 23:01 UTC)