When I decided to take a climbing road trip, I began thinking of myself as an semi-professional athlete. Such a thought is not entirely off the mark; while I'm not earning any money (I'm nowhere near a sufficiently good climber to do so), it is effectively my "job". I spend each day going out and climbing in an effort to improve. During my time at home before the trip I tried to act as an athlete, stretching more regularly, icing my sore fingers and hip, reading about performance measures, and tracking my climbing output. Now, for the first time, I'm on the disabled list.
To be entirely honest, I lost some of the performance focus while on the road. It's hard to ice sore joints when you lack refrigeration. And while I stretch on bouldering days, when I only climb for 5-6 hours, it's much more difficult to do on trad climbing days. On those days I typically climb from 9-7; it's too cold to stretch before 9 and gets dark (and cold) by 8. But I still think the disabled list analogy applies, since I can't do my job due to an injury. I strained a flexor tendon in my left ring finger on Kill by Number, a roof boulder problem in Joe's Valley, UT. I'm not entirely certain how the strain happened--I made a big throw with my right hand, missed the hold, and fell to the ground. My best guess is that upon missing the right hand hold, my left hand over-squeezed its hold and full body weight on that squeeze strained the tendon.
The strain is relatively mild, and I am rehabbing it at my parents' house in Santa Fe. In many ways, it occurred at a good time, since I spent a few days hiking in Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks (pictures soon, and strong recommendations for both but especially Zion), and then came home to Santa Fe for a break. My current rehab program consists mostly of rest, though it also includes two sets of Lewis reaction (cold vasodilation) icing each day. I also apply light stresses on the finger using a 1-gallon milk jug, which has been slowly filled over the last week as the finger grows stronger.
A major topic of distraction away from my finger during my time in Santa Fe has been a recent report of climbing gear failure. An Alien, a model of spring-loaded camming device made by CCH (a very small company located in Wyoming) broke when loaded during a fall. Not surprisingly this makes many climbers nervous, as we rely on such gear in life-critical situations regularly.
CCH is an "old-school" company, meaning it is a small garage operation rather than the modern corporation that many climbing companies have become. They developed a wonderful design, but lack many modern production methods. As a result, the product looks much less polished than other gear, and for most of the company's lifetime it lacked the same type of quality control larger companies have. This is a throwback to climbing companies thirty or forty years ago, when quality control was minimal because climbing was an extremely niche sport, and many climbers actually made their own gear or had friends who did so. However, with modern climbing gyms and sport climbing, the sport has grown to encompass a much large section of society. Climbing companies have responded by becoming modern corporations with strict quality control to avoid lawsuits and angry customers. Two years ago Alien cams suffered a few failures due to quality control which was nowhere near the industry standard. CCH responded slowly, but eventually claimed to improve quality control with inspection and strength testing of all their camming units. I purchased several Aliens last fall, under the assumption that the new testing procedures guaranteed the strength of the tested and stamped Aliens.
The most recent failure, however, occurred on an Alien with a date stamp of 3/07, well past the date when testing was implemented. As a result, I am now suspicious of the quality of my own Aliens, and have been working to test them myself. On Sunday, my father and I went to an abandoned parking lot and pulled on them with my car. We used his car as an anchor and then using webbing, cord, carabiners, and a tow rope set up a pull with my car. I had hoped to break the cord, which should have broken around 600 lbs. of force, but ended up pulling my father's car instead (we had it in gear and with the emergency break on, so it provided at least a reasonable resistance). This is very promising though I don't want to trust the pieces until I put them through a shock load using a steel cable and a hammer (because of the very low energy absorption by the steel cable, it is possible to produce significant forces in this manner).
It is an interesting experience to be thinking about gear as something that I, myself, am responsible to test. We live in an increasingly consumer society where we expect things to work reliably (especially in life-critical applications), and when they don't we simply return them for functional units. In this case, I do not have any knowledge that the products are defective, but given the dire consequences of failure, it would be negligent not to test them myself. So I feel like I've stepped back in time to the 1960s climbing scene, or the 1980s punk scene, both of which had a strong do-it-yourself ethic. I like doing these things myself, and have enjoyed considering and debating how to apply appropriate pull tests. I hope that I will not have to purchase replacement cams (an expensive proposition), but will investigate that possibility in the near future.
2 comments:
any danger that shock tests weaken the equipment you're testing?
I'm not too worried that the tests I did will weaken the tested equipment, but it's certainly worth thinking about.
All materials, even metals, have an innate elasticity. As long as the stresses I put on the materials don't surpass the elastic stresses, no permanent deformation will take place. Beyond this some form of plastic deformation will occur, though perhaps even a small amount of this will not cause problems.
The two ways to cause deformation are with very large stresses and with stresses applied over a long time. The time period should be fine, since I only pulled on them for a few seconds (this, by the way, is how convection in the Earth works; the differential stresses aren't really that large, but over millions of years rocks will flow).
In terms of the magnitude of the force applied (which of course corresponds to a stress by the shape of the gear), this is why I used a piece of cord of a known strength in the system; this should fail well before the forces seen in the testing done by the gear companies themselves (CCH claims to test to 1700 lbs; the cord has a strength rating of 900 lbs, leaving me good leeway). So I think I'm okay, but if I've missed something here I'd be happy to discuss it.
And usually it's called crack climbing. Which is why I'm wearing the Enjoy Crack T-shirt that Tim Elling made.
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