I promised to upload some photos of the rope climbing setup that I use (copied gratefully from the one used by Roan65). If youre a heavier climber its best to use static rope for this setup but dynamic works fine for me. These rigs give you a 2:1 mechanical advantage to haul yourself up the rope - this makes things a bit easier on your pushing leg. Youll quite quickly learn when and by how much to advance the handled ascender - but I do recommend trying to use it mainly as a way of stabilising yourself and NOT as a means of pulling yourself up. Maintain an upright posture and use your leg strength to get you up the rope. Youll find it much easier. Note: this post is not an instruction manual! DO NOT try this setup or any other unless you know what you are doing and have been properly trained. Your safety is entirely your own responsibility. OK the first pic shows the standard rig. The rope comes down through a handled ascender, through a grigri2 attached to the harness D, back up to a pulley on the ascender, down thru a carabiner on the harness leg loop and into a Pantin on your foot. The carabiner on the leg loop helps to increase the amount of rope you pull through each time and also captures the gear when you release it for descent. The second pic shows the standard rig switched to descent mode. Hanging on the grigri, you unclip the pantin and the hand ascender (which slides down the rope and is caught by the carabiner on the leg loop). Then you simply descend by CAREFULLY opening the grigri WHILE HOLDING the slack end of the rope. Clipping the slack end of the rope through the side clip on the main carabiner (as shown) can give you more control and a smoother descent. The third pic shows a modified version of the standard rig that Im currently playing with. It swaps the grigri for a mini-Traxion progress capture pulley. This is much more efficient for capturing the full rope movement generated by the climbers leg action - which can make a big difference for a heavy and/or tired climber. Without this, Ive seen the whole of a climbers effort just go into winding and un-winding the grigri each time, with almost no rope actually going through the device. There is a price to pay though, which is that switching to descent mode is slightly trickier. Note that, as shown, you MUST have a sling from the handled ascender to the harness with this rig; and you MUST take a descender up with you (you can see mine on the main carabiner) - otherwise you are going to find it extremely hard to get down. The fourth pic shows the modified rig in descent mode. To switch over, you first do a little leg push and unlock the mini-traxion pulley. Then you let your leg back up until you are hanging by the sling from the handled ascender. Now you remove the mini-traxion and clip in your descender. Then you push again with your leg in order to remove the handled ascender. Now WHILE HOLDING the slack end of the rope you rappel down using the descender (or you could use a grigri as the descender if you prefer). The final pic shows me using the standard rig on my way up to bag a cache :-)
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 21:52:49 +0000
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