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Sliding X revisited 27-Jan-2015 At 8:19:25 PM Wendy

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I'm with Kieran in the non-fan field. If your anchor is bodgy - put in more than 2 pieces for starters! 6 bodgy pieces equalised with a knotted off cordelette or similar with the rope, whilst not perfectly equalised, are still better than 2 bodgy pieces with a sliding x even if it is backed up with slings where if a piece fails, there's more movement onto the remaining piece than in a knotted equalised system. And if you are bothering to set up the other slings, it's going to be quicker and simpler to just use a cordellette to rig. Really, would you set up a series of these backed up xes in a real anchor situation of 3-4? and then do you have to run more sliding xes down from each until you get to a centralised anchor point? Isn't it just getting carried away about very little?

I don't even like sliding x on 2 bolts - even if you accept that each individual bolt is bombproof, which for lots of bolts, I wouldn't, you still have 1 sling in the system. If the sling fails, the whole belay is gone. I like redundancy.

It's not that hard to clip your sling into the 2 bolts, slide it around a bit to find the most likely direction of pull, chuck in an 8 or overhand there, double check the loading when you weight it and have 2 independant really bloody close to perfectly equalised legs. Presumably most of us manage a similar exercise on 3-4 pieces of trad gear on a regular basis. When was the last time you saw a reasonably well equalised knotted system fail from a cascade started by one piece failing? I'd be much more worried about the single sling with nylon on nylon movement built into the system.

as a sideline, I was chatting with someone at dinner last night who was saying that the recommendations on sling replacement these days are way lower than I thought - that for spectra in particular, if you are climbing regularly on it, there is suficient sun exposure in only 3 years to warrant retiring it. I'm not sure that any of my slings are actually less than 3 years old. So that single sling may be even more of a concern.