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Topic Date User

biner breaks on Forever Young 19-Dec-2011 At 1:35:12 PM Climboholic

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On 17/12/2011 useful wrote:
>Aren't we all getting a little haughty about this? If ODH goes around calling
>everything and everyone a retard, he knows he's going to get banned. Lo
>and behold he got banned - for one goddammed pussy week. This is a perfectly
>sensible action by the mods...
>

I fully agree that he should have been banned (although I didn't see what he wrote). There is no point in having rules if you don't enforce them.

I just think that the obnoxious bastard can be entertaining sometimes. I have sometimes wondered what people like ODH are like in real life. Like, for example, if I ran into him at the crag without realising it's the same person that pretends to have tourettes online???

The ironic thing is that he got banned for saying effectively the same thing as me: That the climber wouldn't be able to tell what load was on the biner and that people are making too many assumptions. The difference being that he was willing to accept Ben and Robby's assumptions and I thought a bit of investigation was warranted considering the implications. When a plane crashes they don't just take the pilot's word for what happened, do they?

Getting back to the discussion:

What I didn't agree with was Robby trying to shut down the discussion because he thought he was the final authority on what happened. The orientation of the biner in the first picture was very different than the one provided later. This led Mikl to find that the biner failed in bending and not torsions as people initially thought. So already there was something learnt from the debate.

Still, I was interested in thinking more about Ben and Robby's account. In the first picture there doesn't even appear to be enough room for the quickdraw to move to the second orientation, particularly from just "brushing against it" (remember the picture is of the 1st bolt, not the 3rd were it broke). Surely, anyone competent enough to lead would already know that the second orientation is bad. When you think about it, the second orientation could conceivably happen even if there was plenty of room behind the bolt. All that is required is uneven rock around the bolt or narrow legs on the U.

What Ben said earlier was right: it is the climbers responsibility to be aware of the safety of their gear. When climbing trad you take care not to knock gear out as you climb past, same goes for sport. I don't like how Neil felt obliged to apologise for the bolt placement (as I don't think the countersinking on the bolt was to blame). I think bolters accepting responsibility for the actions of climbers could set a bad precedent. Ultimately, it was the climber and to a lesser extent the belayer who were responsible for what happened. If the biner failed because of a manufacturing fault, then that would be a different story.

If nothing else, some bolters have added an extra step to their bolting practice and any sport climbers that were under the delusion that they are not responsibile for their gear, have been set straight. So all this discussion was worthwhile.