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Homemade gear 2-Nov-2007 At 2:36:54 PM skink

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A friend of mine (who had a resoling sideline business going on) started making climbing shoes by putting climbing rubber soles and rands onto cheap canvas tennis shoes (similar to Dunlop Volleys) - his idea was to provide a cheap alternative shoe for beginners. He made about a half dozen, and then realized the tennis shoe design was to clunky for it to be worthwhile.

I seem to remember he made his own steel figure of eight, cos he wore out alloy eights to quickly (he was side-side-lining in the high-rise window cleaning business).

This same dude (he was very self-reliant) made his own ice-axe for a trip to South America (ice-axes were hard to come by and very expensive in South Africa at the time - mid 90's). Laser cut the head from stainless steel sheet, shaft was two aluminium tubes, one inside the other, a spiky bit, some rivets and rubber tape handle - voila. His biggest design flaw was he made the shaft round (stuck as he was with roundstock tube) - made it hard to swing the pick or adze with any sort of consistency cos the whole deal rotated in your hand on a plain round handle. But we got up Huascaran anyway (well two out of three, Steve got stomach bug at basecamp).

I made my first headtorch by cannibalising a hand torch - worked sweet as.

All I can think of for now, but I'm sure there's more...