Climbing Sling Myths

We just bought a bunch of black diamond nylon climbing slings so we can break test a bunch of different configurations that's in an image that Thodoros Papagatsios? I don't know. Greek to me. He sent me an image from at Inside Engineers about the different configurations you can do with slings and the theoretical strengths you would get from them. And we just want to know if they are correct and if you would whip. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinx and this is Bobby. We like the new shirt. And we're here at Slack Snap Lab where we can basically test all the things people have opinions on about climbing gear. This image has been floating around and we just recreated it here. The different configurations you can put a sling and the theoretical strengths you would get. Have you ever seen a 28 kilonewton sling? Nope. We got the most common type that you could get of a nylon sling is a black diamond 22 kilonewton sling. And so we put it straight which in this case is 22 kilonewtons. You have doubled over which in theory is doubled as much. So in this case would be 44. And if you double it before doubling it over the bar you in theory get 4x as much. In their image is 112 because it's 4x28. In this situation is 88. This is wrapped around but it should be the same strength just doubled. This is a girth itch where it's inside of itself. Theoretically it will be half the strength or 11 kilonewtons. Only I can say it as wrong as I say it. The image has all the carabiners which we took the time to put all the carabiners and the stitching in the same place for continuity. This carabiner sits straight as you can see when you double it up like this. And in the image it's this way. So already the image is wrong. Where else is the image wrong? We'll see. This carabiner also is kind of sitting at a 45 degree angle rather than just straight. I assume these are going to be correct. It's the girth hitch that may or may not be 50% in the industrial slings or the span sets that we use for slack lining around trees or sometimes rigging highline anchors. They have images on the label that have the different configurations and the different strengths and when you do girth hitch something like that you do lose quite a bit. I imagine this is correct but we will find out. But first another thing that's not exactly wrong but it's just a little odd is this shirt. It is so funny and if somebody can make a meme out of this video clip right here we would appreciate it. I would appreciate it. He's not going to appreciate it. But seriously Happa Design helps make a bunch of shirts and so we thought this would be funny to surprise Bobby with. Go to slackline.com slash store I think is going to be the thing and it's going to have Happa Designs all their stuff on it and if you just want the vectors and print your own shirts everything's free all the time. You can just download and print your own stuff but if you don't want to go through the hassles of that Happa Design can hook you up. If you have other design ideas besides the super good enough logos that we wear I wear too much of hit me up send me something and we'll put it on the website for everybody to enjoy and let's hear some opinions about this because we were looking at Reddit and it was pretty funny. The first comment on there says they're just talking about sling strength right? Most carabiners are in the 20 to 30 kilonewton range so wouldn't the carabiner be the point of failure in most of those setups? Yes. Yes it would. The carabiners we just tested for another episode broke 21 and 23 kilonewtons and this is going to break about 22. So in all the other situations where it's stronger or doubled up or quadrupled up yes the carabiner will break first which is why we're going to use shackles to break these because we're not going to break the slings otherwise. And then Your Stoked wrote, I love the name, 14 kilonewtons seems plenty strong in most applications. What situation where that could be a problem? Now I can't think of one in climbing where you would need more than 14 but it's nice to have some safety margin built into your anchor assuming that this is an anchor and not just an extender for a cam which would break lower than 22 kilonewtons anyways. But if you've got rub abrasion or it's had UV light for a long period of time and it's degraded the material you kind of want a safety margin there. So it's not also just for climbing. This could be for lifting applications or highline rigging or a lot of different things outside of climbing that this concept can really help people with. Probably Made That Up said, my haul bag weighs 14,500 kilograms. You sure take too much stuff, Big Wally. General rescue rigging systems have a 10 to 1 safety factor and if you're going to have two people on the load you want to have a 20 kilonewton master point. The Frisky Turtle said, this guide isn't necessarily about climbing. I've seen it a few times in the aerial scene. 14 kilonewtons is fine for one person. The girth hitch application. But you might have multiple people on an apparatus moving around for your Frisky Turtle. Waldenian said, oh yes, a sling that would hold 11 tons attached to a carabiner that only holds 2.5. Carabiner is there for an example. But I'm glad people realize that the carabiner is going to be the weakest point in the system. And my favorite comment so far is a reply to the statement that is adequate for 99% of recreational climbing scenarios. And his reply was, more like 99.9999 percent. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where it's possible to generate 14 kilonewtons. There was an interesting YouTube video where a guy measured forces on a climber, belayer, and bolt in a variety of gym falls. Really interesting. He did not record a force of more than 5 kilonewtons if I recall. On the bigger fall I got 0.84. Awesome. 2.60. Here's that video. It's not super helpful when you're trying to research something just to find your own research when you're actually trying to get more information. But it was still pretty cool to see that. And another comment said, this post implies that 14 kilonewtons is unsafe or 50% of the sling strength. If you're just connecting it to a cam, they're right. It's not that big of a deal because the cam is probably going to come out or fail before that. It is important to understand the concepts of when slings have and double from their original stated strength. And that you don't just get 22 kilonewtons or the equivalent of, what, 4 elephants. How much is an elephant weight? An African swallow or a European swallow? Give me one. Oh yeah, an African swallow maybe, but not a European swallow. That's my point. It's important that the 22 kilonewtons or half of one African bush elephant is what it's rated for, but it can change depending on how you use it. It's just super important to understand your gear, which is what we're all about here. Let's go understand it by breaking some stuff. What's 4 times 29? A lot. Smells like burnt brakes. Are we sure nothing's on fire? She's warm. Interesting. Well, let's do another one. Okay, here's our sling. Broken the stitching again. Broken the stitching again at substantially higher than it's rated for, which means... We're going to have to use some multiplication. That's warm. Like every time. And we have our 2 to 1, so we have our hydraulic and then it comes through here and we have a whole video on how to build a brake test machine. What do you think about that? It's about double of what we were getting. 44 we were expecting. Quite a bit more. And it broke. Did not break in the stitching this time. Where it did break last time, which shows the bend radius wasn't really having an effect. That tied itself into a knot, so that's pretty neat-o. It did not break in the stitching. Stitching looks okay. I think that's probably where it's pinching the bar. 43.90 is less than double because I think it's tearing the edge. Oh, look at that spinning! Okay, okay. So should we wrap it twice instead of three times? Yeah, let's try that and see if we're not getting a compromised result there. Yeah, because it's... You like the elevator music this comes with? 47.76 is a better number because the theory is 44, but we got 56 when we just did the single wrap, right? It was doubled, yeah. Yeah, it was 56. So it's an interesting thing. So it broke more normal than not shred the edge. And so now we've tested straight, basket, wrapped a couple times. I guess we're gonna have to try that one now. That's gonna be really hard with this machine. We're gonna see if we can do it with our two-to-one. Probably not though. Look at that! That's not 88. What happened? Something Bobby pointed out is you have smooth here and then it's like melted here. And then it's smooth and then melted and smooth and this edge is all messed up. So that could have been from when it broke. That could have just been from the compression of itself. Put in the comments below what you think. So the webbing wrapped around itself is probably creating its own friction. Yeah, it might be compressing itself and cutting itself eventually, like forcing it into the bar. Huh, I'm so glad that's not 130 because our two-to-one is not designed for that. Let's do it one more time and see if we get the same result. So we did double double again. Let me show you before we break it that that's kind of the condition of it in here. It didn't have too much edge wear but I just want to show you how it is in this thing. So you can tell us why you think this is breaking lower than four times the MBS or way less than four times what we've been getting. 82.82 is not 88 or over 100 which is what we were afraid we were going to get because in here this says 112 which is four times this. So huh, so this broke clean even though we have some edge damage but that doesn't seem to be the cause of it. Bobby's favorite part is that nut spinning. I think that shirt is funny. So if you double it up and then basket it around it's plenty strong enough. Yes, it's less than four times as much. So now the biggest thing that was discussed is whether or not 14 is enough and we're going to find out if we even get 14. Is 11 kilonewtons enough? So we're going to find out. Put in the comments below if you think it's enough even though you're not going to put 11 kilonewtons on any climbing situation more than likely. Is it still enough? Do you want a safety ratio? If it's stronger than a cam is it okay for your anchor to be only that strong? So put in your comments below that. Let's break it. Interesting. Wait, what is that? Hold on, that's full strength. Yeah. That exclamation mark is not valid. It's not valid with nylon. Dyneema loses a lot of strength when used. Have we tested a straight girth hitch in Dyneema? I've got some in the car probably. Still above full strength. Wow. And this is nylon which is a little bit more forgiving with knots because it stretches whereas Dyneema does not like to bend. So let's test a Dyneema sling in a girth hitch. That's pretty high considering this is anywhere between brand new and severely used. Being used, being Dyneema, and being in a girth hitch should have been breaking. This is a 22 kilonewton NBS by the way. Yeah, we've broken used ones before and 15 kilonewtons is not unreasonable. Oh, can I do the where the videos are? Watch it in this video here or this one. All I want to say is that this is wrong. This is not 4x and this is not half. There are too many variables for theoretical science to be right. Bobby thought it was in selfie mode but nope. That's just an awesome shirt. If you want this shirt, buying t-shirts does not support this channel. They cost too much to print them but we really want the stoke to be shared out there. If you want to print your own, the vectors are free. All the books are free. Everything's free that we do. Everything is through donations. Bobby just donated that sling and you guys have been donating money. Thank you. It's the only reason we have this thing going. Anything you donate goes back into this channel as you can see. The drop tower is getting built while I go to Moab and do some. Also on the store section of the website, we're gonna have discounts and affiliate links that do help me personally out so I can spend my entire day doing this and not feel so guilty about it. It is super interesting that when you actually apply some theoretical math that it doesn't always do what it's supposed to because we actually had a dynamous sling that we 4x'd basically and it was more than 4x the MBS. That was very very interesting. You can see that in this video here. The problem with theoretical math is there's variables in life and we love variables. We love throwing variables into the system and the drop tower is going to help throw some more variables into it when we do the drop tower. When they try to create standards, they try to replicate exactly what they do across all products which is great but if we actually want to know just kind of how things work in real life and just the way you would actually use this stuff, it's pretty nice to have a slack snap machine. Make sure you hit that subscribe button because 80% of you guys who made it to the end of this video are not subscribed. It's not a commitment. It's just a red button. Liking the video helps but sharing it with a friend helps even more. Maybe learn to stay after the jingle because we might put one more interesting brake test out. Thanks for watching. Cheers. So here's one more test where we do the girth hitch directly to a climbing hanger because I have personally done this before to make myself some more clipping points while being able to still put a carabiner in there and Bobby has seen this before and what have you thought of it? Man, those guys were dumb. We have the two schools of thought sitting here in this room and I think the hanger even has a chance of breaking because we're pulling it the way it's not really designed to be pulled. I just really want the sharp edge to be pulling on that. So something to point out, these are the fix hangers, the older style, which have some of the sharper edges in hangers that you'll see out there. So... But they're a very common hanger. That's not an unrealistic hanger to see. I'll buy lunch if the sling breaks. If you buy lunch if the hanger breaks. Yep, deal. Looks like I'm buying lunch. 9.5. That's super good enough in my book for statically holding specific things like bags. Yeah, I think if it gets loaded and unloaded and unloaded, you're eventually going to damage your sling even at like one or two kilonewtons would be my guess. But you're compromising that by almost... You're getting a quarter of the strength of the sling by doing that. This is not an endorsement to use this method, but put in the comments below what you think. Goodbye for real.