unlocking the reverso

Post by **Paul3eb** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:32 pm

call me what you will, but i have no idea how to unlock a reverso when it autolocks. meetva can testify to this after utah. how do you feed out slack if you're belaying from the top of a climb and the climber falls into space or simply needs rope to unclip? i've heard something about a pulley system and everywhere i looked online i found only complaints about it lowering and a broken link to a diagram.. any help?

Post by **Ascentionist** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:37 pm

It ain't gonna happen. I had a guy fall on the 4th pitch of Foxfire just after starting. He was hanging on the rope with the tips of his toes on the ledge and nothing in front of him, the wall is undercut there. He was stuck.

After much fiddling with the locking biner that the rope passed around I managed to ratchet him down. It was a slow process and was only efferctive because we only needed a few inches of slack. If he had been hanging completely free I don't think I could have gotten him free without cutting the rope.

(In retrospect the guy was my now Thankfully-Ex-Brother-In-Law and it may not have been such a bad thing to cut the rope, but in normal circumstances I wouldn't recommend it, no matter what you saw on Vertical Limit)

Post by **diggum** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:38 pm

Wow. I don't like the sounds of that.

Post by **Paul3eb** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:38 pm

funny.. that's exactly what i had to do, too. it was terrible, not to mention it ate up the biner.

Post by **Ascentionist** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:41 pm

I was pissed. It had not occured to me that I wouldn't be able to lower. After my second fell he said, "Let me down"

I paused to consider this request and then hollered down. "No." I really had no choice.

Petzl sucks for doing that to me. So now I don't use the dratted thing. I should get my money back.

Post by **Paul3eb** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:49 pm

haha! it sounds like we had almost the exact same experience. that's what i really wanted to yell down, too, but the ratcheting worked out alright. thank god it wasn't all that far down. still, i'm sure it seemed to take hours to meetva. it literally when at about a foot a minute. i'm close to ditching the thing but the fact that i spent money on it makes me motivated to learn how to use it.. then i'll feel better about ditching it

Post by **Ascentionist** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 6:06 pm

It would be great on low angle, easy rock wher ethe second can keep their feet on the rock. But i still don't think it fed very fast when I needed to reel in slack. I just didn't like it at all. And it was less than average in the conventional belaying configuration.

I think I still have mine, in the bottom of a tote under some other odd climbing gear that I no longer use.

Post by **haas** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 6:20 pm

learn how to escape the belay, that's about the only way and it's a good skill to have anyway. It only takes a locking biner and a sling plus some know how. Once you escape the belay, you can put them back on belay with the reverso without the locker for the autolock mode. It's great for alpine climbing when there's a three man team

Post by **Paul3eb** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 6:25 pm

haas.. how would that work? isn't escaping the belay only if the belay is clipped into you?

Post by **neuroshock** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 6:26 pm

i've read, but haven't tried, that in autolock mode you can clip the locking biner with a sling that goes to your belay loop. sit back and your weight should "unlock"the device.

again, i haven't actually tried this.