Trad Rack
the pink and red tri have gotten me outta some pretty shitty situations where nothing else would work. on straight forward/very obvious placements in cracks and horizontals cams and nuts may work better and are a little easier to place (but once you learn to place tris you can do it with one hand just as quick). but when its an "outta the box" type placement you cant beat the small tris. i never leave the ground without 2 pinks, 1 red, 1 brown
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as far as cams. like a lot of people have said, go out and try as many as you can. get what feels good to you. cams of all brands have pulled, walked, placed bad and held a fall. if they are ce, uiaa certified and properly placed/used and in good rock they "should" hold. i was looking last night and i have 6 different cam companies on my rack. if your climbing a lot and with different people you need to get used to different types of cams. nothing sucks more than cruxing and looking for the green color and not being able to look at head size to chose your piece.
http://www.redriveroutdoors.com
If you need to contact me , email me. Less Internet, less stress
If you need to contact me , email me. Less Internet, less stress
JR wrote:Stop with the freak'in tri-cams already. Why do you think you have to jury rig them to start with? Because they require three hands to place. I would venture to say that you will never get better placements out of a tri-cam as you would any name brand cam or stopper. But if you aren't going to get real cams and you want to lead Motha by all means roll the dice.
A tri-cam can be placed in a shallow placement with 1 hand. However, recessed placements often require 2 hands...which isn't an option on a difficult climb. By reinforcing the 'stem' of the tri-cam, you can make it work like a cam. You can slam them in with one hand, give a pull, clip and go. All for 15 bucks.
Is a cam better? Probably. But its more expensive and heavier. Tri-cams are no replacement for stoppers, but will certainly go where no stopper will. And there are a few pink/red tri-cam placements that will go where no other piece will fit.
If you get a shit-ton of cams of all sizes, you probably won't miss the tri-cams too much. but if you're building your first rack, and you don't have a few thousand dollars to spend, tri-cams are the shit.
EDIT: one other thing. For horizontals, nothing beats tri-cams. Sure the cams will fit in there, but if you fall, you're gonna jack up your cam stems, but the tri-cam sits beautifully in a horizontal, its natural home.
What ever you do don't get any of those DMM cams (I think it was dmm, might be wild country). I went up some multi-pitch climb out at red rocks one day (frogsland I think) and found like SEVEN of these that had walked and gotten stuck. I thought it was crazy that there were so many cams left on the route until I noticed that they were all the same brand. Not a single BD or metolius cam was stuck.
Not sure if it was mutliple parties, or one retarded leader, but I'd still stay away from them if possible.
Not sure if it was mutliple parties, or one retarded leader, but I'd still stay away from them if possible.
I don't trad climb that much, so I'm no expert, but I basically follow the same guideline. I suspect that I've placed the pink tricam on 60-70% of the trad pitches I've lead. They're cheap, they don't weigh much - just take a few and give them a try, you may just learn to love them.RRO wrote:i never leave the ground without 2 pinks, 1 red, 1 brown
With so much good gear on the market, the real challenge, today, is to limit yourself to what is most useful and still light enough to carry. Unless you are climbing perfectly parallel sided cracks you can lighten your rack significantly by replacing a few cams with hexes (on cord, not wire). Also, your biggest stoppers will be much lighter if they're slung on a somewhat longish piece of cord. And, yes, the smallest tricams fit where nothing else goes. And don't forget brassies when you're travelling outside the Red.
i know this point is a bit late but as far as BD making gear in China, they're doing it the right way. If you're going to make gear in China where quality control can be questionable you've got to be really careful. Rather than contracting stuff out, BD set up its own facility, its own building, distribution center etc. They also have a Quality Assurance lab there that has the same equipment as they use in Salt Lake and I know the guy who spent the last year in China setting up the QA lab and training people on it. In addition to all this, the equipment that is making the Chinese C4's is much newer than the stuff making the US C4's, which means quality it going to be increased. To say that BD cams are "Crap" is just stupid. I am not saying they are the holy grail of cams but they do work well, even if you like something more.
Sand inhibits the production of toughtosterone, so get it out and send.
Shamis, my biggest complaint w/ Camalots has always been the short stems and the weight, that's why I started buying friends way back in da day. C4's have improved this, but in my experience Cams are the hardest to clean, especially with the irregular placements in the Red. Their short stems and their wide cam lobes can make it a challenge when you don't have baby hands, especially a deep placement. When overcammed they are a freakin disaster, and they walk as much as any others.
That said, if you want to tell someone what to avoid, try and provide an example of what kinds of situations would be problematic. If you can't do that, when communicating to a gumby a rule to live by, that you made on the spot, on that one climb in Colorado back then, at least know what freakin brand you're talking about!
This is why you are retarded if you ask for advice from strangers on the internet. Everyones a fukkin amateur. Morons, all of us.
That said, if you want to tell someone what to avoid, try and provide an example of what kinds of situations would be problematic. If you can't do that, when communicating to a gumby a rule to live by, that you made on the spot, on that one climb in Colorado back then, at least know what freakin brand you're talking about!
This is why you are retarded if you ask for advice from strangers on the internet. Everyones a fukkin amateur. Morons, all of us.