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General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

Todd Skinner - Dies on Leaning Tower Yosemite 26-Oct-2006 At 6:56:23 PM BigMike

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On 26/10/2006 rod wrote:
but when I belay someone I'm obliged to use the loop.

Why obliged? If you get a nice big pear-shaped locking biner, you can run it through both loops as well. This also serves to keep the gates of the belay device horizontal ... which means the rope is far more likely to "catch" in the right part of the device when you arrest a fall etc.

Also it stops the biner flapping around and cross-loading while the rope gets hung up on the lock mechanism etc, which often happens.

I've had a few animated discussions about people who suggest that this imparts a three-way load on the biner .. but seriously, them pear-shaped numbers are so wide on the big end that the harness loops tend to just smoosh into the one end. Hardly a true cross-load.

Besides even a cross-loaded biner will take 10kN...