Safety

[pigsteak]

those beginner belayers should not be left alone to belay with a gri gri..you climb with them, you are asking for it.

[Shamis]

those beginner belayers should not be left alone to belay with a gri gri..you climb with them, you are asking for it.

I'll just stick with you and your duct taped harness.

[charlie]

Shamis, Jay, Savage, many of your comments had qualifiers (if, unless, as long as, I have only seen....).

People stupidly build a lot of assumptions from the intardwebs. Please be careful when (if) making statements about tools and techniques that can very easily be misunderstood, especially when it comes to safety. In my opinion arguments about this kind of thing on the web cause more problems than they solve.

That said, I'd prefer gri gri's be outlawed. They teach laziness.

[Shamis]

I see what you're saying charlie, but I think open discussion ultimately forces all parties to re-evaluate their 'belief's' which is a good thing.

[Josephine]

That said, I'd prefer gri gri's be outlawed. They teach laziness.

i learned on an ATC and that was fine for a while. but once i started climbing with partners that outweighed me by 50+ lbs and wanted to hang dog on routes and work out moves i learned that a gri-gri is a good thing. it's an especially good thing for lowering climbers that are significantly heavier than i am.

instead of outlowing gri-gri's, i'd prefer people actually learn how to belay. i think it requires just as much time and attention to learn how to belay well as it does to climb well - but too often people are just focused on i climb 5.hard rather than spending time considering how well/poorly they belay.

[bcombs]

Tie an overhand on the brake side while your buddy is resting, then go hands free. Always use a 9.8 or higher just to be safe.

Pay out slack using the method in the current Petzl brochure, it's the safest method.

Always use a biner that is fat enough to fill the entire hole in the grigri. I use the Petzl Attache, but I've seen people use that super fat Omega Jake with the green autolock. It just barely fits in the grigri.

[charlie]

Shamis, agreed. I just think the intertubes isn't the best place for it. You never know your audience and what they might take away from the conversation.

That said, I'd prefer gri gri's be outlawed. They teach laziness.

i learned on an ATC .......

There ya go. It's a poor worker that blames his tools but you "have" to know how to belay when you use an atc. Not so much with gri gri. I use a gri gri more often than not, but I didn't for more than a few years and feel like I give a good belay because of it.

[Canuck]

how thin was the rope? and how old was the gri-gri? Also, how much did the climber weigh?

I nearly decked from 40' in an incident in which a gri-gri did not lock up. The rope was 10.2. The gri-gri was about a month old and was loaded correctly. I weighed around 145lbs then. My belayer did not have either hand on the gri-gri to begin with. Neither he, I, nor another experienced climber watching could see anything that impeded the cam from locking up.
I did not deck (stopped about 5' off the ground) because my belayer's only instinct was to grab the brake end of the rope (8 years rappelling for the army and 2 years belaying only on an atc probably helped with that instinct).

The chance a gri-gri will not lock (which, imho, is not the same thing as "fail") is tiny. But it's not any more difficult to use a gri-gri with your brake hand on the rope. So why not keep it on as an extra measure of safety?

[Shamis]

A 10.2 on a month old gri-gri? Does not compute.

[Canuck]

A 10.2 on a month old gri-gri? Does not compute.

I'm a physicist with engineering background. I'd been climbing for 10 years at the time. It surprised the hell out of me. But it happened. I suspect (but can't prove) why the cam didn't lock. If anyone wants a long discussion of forces and angles and other good physics-y stuff, I'd be more than happy to explain it in person.
My point remains: why not keep your brake-hand on?