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Topic Date User

OmegaPacific biners - a word of warning 28-Sep-2005 At 4:15:14 PM klareralt

Message

On 28/09/2005 skip wrote:
:>Omega Pacifics test avoided the weakness that the Jake has compared to
>other biner. It's tendancy to become cross loaded. It has been agreed by
>general consensus on this thread that many brands of wirelock biners have
>sharp edges. It is this, in combination with the jakes tendancy to cross
>load that causes the problem.
>Should some more test by OP be in order?

From the OP test:

"In the field, we belayed toproped and lead climbers alike with the various carabiners to get a feel for whether any had a greater tendency to flip and become cross-loaded than any other. While not as reproducible or objective as our lab tests, we felt this was worthwhile to refamiliarize ourselves with how other brands compare to the Jake in real-world use.

In that testing, we found that while toproping, it was consistently easier to maintain proper loading (along the major axis) for all brands. When belaying a leader, all the carabiners tested have some tendency to rotate and become cross-loaded due to the more dynamic action of paying out slack and taking in rope as required of a leader. None were particularly more prone to it than any other.

However, when clipped into both tie-in points of the harness, as opposed to being clipped into the belay loop, the tendency to rotate and become cross-loaded increased significantly, regardless of brand."

I think they did test it.... This would be extremely hard to test in an experiemental setting, though, just too many things to control for. So until someone manufactures a robot which can mimic belaying behaviour perfectly on repeated trails, this one is probably gonna have to be judged on gut feeling...

Personally I find that big screwgates are more prone to spin and crossload compared to smaller screwgates. So I stick to the small ones...