C4 vs Ultralights: Testing Climbing Cams AT BLACK DIAMOND'S LAB

How's my hair? We are going to test C4 Camelots from Black Diamond today. These are pretty damn light, but these are just called C4 Camelots. They have an ultralight version, which instead of a steel cable in the handle, they have Dyneema, which I think is pretty cool. Now this is crimped up here at the neck, where the cable comes up here, but the Dyneema is spliced here at the bottom, and then it loops over a pin at the top. It doesn't have quite the bend radius I think Dyneema normally likes to have, but obviously they're super good enough. Black Diamond is putting them out. That's generally our goal, super good enough. The issue is, they're saying there's a 5-7 year expiration date on the ultralights, because obviously time isn't going to do a lot to this if it's stored properly, except for the nylon sling, which you can actually re-sling them. After 10 or 20 years, you can replace these and make this super good enough, but you can't really re-sling the ultralights because it's all kind of integrated inside. 10% of what you buy at ExtremeGear.org does support me and makes sure that I can keep doing this. So if you're going to go buy cams, buy it there, but I don't know how to break these up here because I'm on top of Prusik Peak, and all I have is about a half a bottle of water left in these two cams, so let's go to the lab. There is a .5 black diamond cam. Oh, we lost his helmet! How sad. Yeah, camcars are solid, baby, and so is that cam. The peak force was 10.56. Let's see what this breaks at. 3, 2, 1. 14.52. It popped. There's no sling! Broke the sling. We're at right where the cable would be. We're doing the .75 again. No sling! Does that look familiar? Yeah, I thought so. That's where they normally break. Wires don't like pinch points, and a carabiner is a pinch point. It's at a force you're never going to get. So if you have a good placement, it's probably super good enough. Oh, this is seized shut, man. That is what I would call tipped out. This doesn't function. The trigger does not work at all. It came out of the head! This is the Dyneema stem, and you can see in there, I think that's a 12-grade, ultra-high molecular density polyethylene. Crushed the edge of the tips and actually started to move the lobes that were seized, and that's just the plastic trigger for those wires. All of that stem is gone. So we've got the stem, and there's a little pin in there, I hope you can see it, and it looks like this was wrapped around that somehow, and that's what secured it in there. That's super strong for a cam. So this is rusted, but it still works. So right now, all my weight is on this. I'm bounce-testing it. 12.66. Another deep capitation one. So I think I figured out how they make these, is there's a little pin inside of here, and I think they just make a loop with the Dyneema. It's a small bend radius. I'm surprised we're not getting lower results. So here's a number three black diamond. 3, 2, 1. Shit! Whoa! That is mangled! It's totally flattened out! Messed up the cam. Busted the rock. I mean, that's just such good thumbnail material. This is an old Camelot 3.5. This is our new ultralight one. This is actually, used to be my cam. I marked it with green nail polish. Because that's original. And I stopped, well, Ryan copied me on that. And I stopped using it because there was this much flex in it. But you'll notice these lobes all buckled. And I'm curious if these, which have a lot more material there, will not do the same thing and we'll get a better result. Matt asked if they break dynamically or statically in the lab. They get those numbers. Can somebody from Black Diamond tell us that? Do cams get rated based on a very static engineer driven build test? Or is it like dynamically loaded with their weight in a track system? We don't have a track for our weight to fall into so there's variables on whether or not it's turned or twisted or spinning. But that shouldn't affect the ultimate force. But that's how I fall. So I don't mind, I like what I have. But how do they generate that number? Compare apples to apples, I think engineers create a very sterile, perfect environment in order to give us those numbers. Which is probably what you need to do to compare two different products. I'm going to go compare a product right now. There's our 3.5 Camelot with a soft shackle in the eye. I just do not think that's coming out. That is a different result. Okay, so we had failure there and it released and just shot out of the top of the cam crusher. Wow! What, what? 20-something. 22.71. I retired this because I was worried about the cams flexing back and forth and the nylon sling getting old. It turns out this is the strongest cam we've ever tested. So on my way to Moab here, I thought why not hit up Black Diamond and ask them about the ultralight directly. And I just sent an email to their general inbox and within a few days I was talking to the people who helped design it. The next part of this video is an interview in the lab of Black Diamond and getting to break one of the ultralights in their machine. I've made it. I got to touch one of these. Is this a number 20? 21. This is for your standard offset chimneys. Yeah, totally. Okay. One of a kind. I'm Jeremy Steck. I'm a design engineer. I've been here for 11 years. I'm Alex Baker. Same job. One year less than him. Did Black Diamond come to you and be like, we want an iPhone that does something nothing's ever been done before or was this a personal project that turned into a product? That one was probably closer to like a personal project that turned into a product. We're always like screwing around with like lots of different things and if something ends up kind of looking cool enough, then we start to integrate it into like the larger like standard system. But this one was more like come up with this idea and then once we saw the idea, it was like, okay, we should try to commercialize that idea. It wasn't like, there wasn't someone that was like remanded. A very ambitious manager. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You made the lobes lighter, the wires lighter. This is made out of Dyneema. These cost more money. Is that because it took so much money to develop or did it, does it cost more money to like hand splice this stuff and because you're not just pinching a cable with a machine up here. The cost is probably more related to the assembly process than the actual materials involved. Even if this was the most expensive, let's say Dyneema out there, it's still only a couple bucks worth of actual material. Yeah, the Dyneema itself like material wise. Like this is nothing. This is nothing. Especially at the scale you guys buy. But I don't know an automatic splicing machine out there. Unfortunately, we don't either. I think from like the first, our first time like actually screwing around in the lab to it being on shelves was probably like three years, something like that. Which is pretty normal and yeah, maybe even arguably a little bit short, but you can see that the Dyneema, it does have to twist 90 degrees as it comes through here so that it can wrap around this little rivet up here and then it's spliced at the bottom. So it's really just a loop of Dyneema. That's it. Now, the rule is you're supposed to have a big ass bend radius for any textile that get full strength and you're not getting full strength out of its full potential, but it's still strong. You don't have to. Right? Yeah. I mean the, you know, full strength is there's probably an ASTM test or something where it's wrapped around a large drum, but yeah, we don't even come close to that. So you don't need to though. No, we don't need to because you know, I don't know what's the rating on this thing is probably like 10 or 12 can it probably breaks in the 15 range most of the time. Yeah. I was getting above 12 and spoiler alert. The ones I broke was in a house fire. So they were old and in a house fire, not in the actual fire, but just the water damage, the heat and Dyneema doesn't like heat. Now you said you've tested this in cars in Mexico. Yeah. Because you know, Dyneema has a very low melting temperature. We needed to make sure that that wasn't going to be an issue. And I think the worst case scenario we came up with was like, if you put it on the dash of your car in the hot sun, when it's super hot out for a long time. So we, you know, at one point we put little data loggers in there and send them to Mexico. What is interesting is you can bring it quite close to its melting point. And then it's actually like still full strength. It's great until it's not. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now you have a conservative expiration date on here. We don't know for sure. And we like how long this thing can sit around and then become not usable for all sorts of reasons. It might be that it's like not strong enough anymore, but also it could be that it just like won't retract or like maybe the triggers fall apart or something like that. But the triggers are smaller too. Yeah. And so the reality is, is we have to choose some sort of estimate for when we think the thing is going to expire. And I don't know exactly what we put in the instructions, but that's our best estimate. And it's probably a little bit conservative, but it's, there's also probably some good reasons for it. You know, like if you do end up, if it is in a super hot environment or exposed to water or salt and all these sorts of things, you know, you, you have to be pretty confident that it's still going to be good if you're going to write it in the instructions. Yeah. If you're putting it officially in the paperwork. If you look at our test plan for cams, there's like the CE stuff up here. And then there's like, like, that's like 10% of it probably. There's all this other shit, especially fatigue testing and environmental testing. Cause you'll cyclically load this as well, right? You'll throw it in hot cars, you'll go out and use it. So ice, water, um, various, various other crack configurations. Yeah. Some stuff that looks like CE tests, but we put it in the jig in very weird ways, maybe over some edges. Yeah. Redesigning something that already exists. Did this take you nearly as much work as something that's very different? Well, that one's a little tricky because, you know, to be frank, the brief was don't **** it up. Cause this is like everybody's favorite cam and we're going to try to make it a little bit sweeter. Oftentimes people get greedy and then you ruin it. So I'd say it was tricky because we had a lot of ideas, but we were like, you know, there was a lot of ideas that were kind of were left, you know, on the shelf with those because we're like, that might be too much for this round or we're a little uncertain or users might not appreciate this. So we had to kind of weigh that. In fact, the product changed even through field testing a little bit. You don't want to change the formula of Coke after 100 years and even just handing people samples of the new ones. Immediately people were like already kind of like, I don't really want a new one. We had some, some black lobes on there in the middle instead of they used to always be silver in the middle. And that was a problem. People didn't like that. When does this become a standard? Oh my God. Just making that one was so hard. Well is it because you have to hand make it because you only made one? Yeah. That's mostly it. Gotcha. And it needed to look good. Yeah. Pulling on the trigger, you have to have Alex Arnold's strength just to pull this thing. When's the number six and seven or seven and eight come back out? They're being built now. Are they? Okay. Because everyone wants them. I know. I thought, I thought we've been building them all along and people keep asking me about them. Yeah. Apparently we haven't, for whatever reason we haven't built them, but they are for sure. Like I just consulted with guys like last week about it. Like they're on the list in the next like week or two. Cause you know the standard picture where it goes all the way to the number eight. Yeah. Put that on extreme gear store and everyone flooded to it for the big ones thinking they were in there. It's like, nah, actually they're sold out like everywhere else. You didn't make the ultra light for what the five and six because the weight of the stem to the rest of it doesn't save enough weight to justify that. Yeah. If we were to do that, we could have put this light stem on the five and six, but the weight savings would have been fairly minimal. Even though it seems like it should have been more, it really wouldn't have been that much. All the weight savings would be more if you can do something with the head. Yeah. Which Jeremy just did the five and the six and I'm sure it's way lighter than the old five and six. I think it's just a percentage game though. Like, I mean it would, you definitely would save some weight by taking out the steel cable and all that stuff, but it's by percent of the cam, it's a low percent number from, would you go all the way down to 0.4 or 0.4 is the smallest on the ultra light. Yeah. We actually, we brought the point. It was a 0.3. We never sold it, but we came this close. Now are these for funsies or is this the newest and latest in flex stems? Unless there's demand, you know, maybe people want it. Got a curve to the left. That's a reach around? I mean, we have a team for every project there's, we have guys that are good at a variety of things. We have industrial designers. There's the guys that get the ergonomics right. Yeah. You know, that sort of thing. You know, just visually making it look appealing. You know, we're kind of like the guys that make stuff work. You know, oftentimes making it ugly there, you know, so it's a back and forth between the ID guys. We have QA guys that sit in, they're the guys that do the testing and also make recommendations. You know, that things need to be stronger or maybe statistically it's not strong enough. Like that kind of thing. Yeah. We have manufacturing engineers. We got, you know, everybody's in there like marketing sales. I mean, everybody's kind of a part of the team. I just love that. Like the QA guys are going to see me touching the Instron, surprised there's no one coming Man, a brake test machine in a climate controlled environment. How exciting. This machine. Whoa. Let's see here. There, it still works. When brake detection went off, it stops pulling. We could now just rip it apart and see. Is that a setting or is that a thing? It's a sensitivity, yeah. Gotcha. This is an interesting thing is the neural biting the teeth. And you can see when you get to those kinds of loads, this kind of flattens out a little bit. There we go. Typical. It's just plastic, right? Technically the rope's plastic. The whole thing's plastic. So that's the pin. You can pull this guy apart and look at this a little more if you wanted to. It's usually kind of stuck in there. Very standard Chinese finger trap style. One goes in the other. One goes in the other one. We did it one time and then we stitched it. And the stitching doesn't hold the force. The stitching keeps it from coming undone. Yeah, it would be full strength for sure one time without the stitching, but if you want it to be able to hold thousands and thousands of loads, it'll come apart if you don't stitch So you can't really like separate the design from the process of this particular product. So you know, the design and the assembly process really had to evolve together on this one. So the production, the normal production team was like very involved in the design of this thing and there's no way that it could have like came together without the ability to work like directly with a good production team. Otherwise it'd be like, if you try to just hand this off to someone and be like, go build this. Yeah. That's impossible. Were you guys Dyneema nerds before this? No, not at all. We like, you know, went to YouTube and Googled how to splice and then got a pen out and it probably took us like 45 minutes to make our first splice, you know, cause we didn't understand it and we didn't know how to do it. And then just spiraled completely out of control from there. And you guys basically just started making loops, right? I think the very first thing we did is we just like made a loop and we're like, is this really going to be as strong as they say it is? And then it was, and you're like, all right, what's the next step? And then you do that, you are like, you realize the possibilities are pretty crazy with Dyneema. Yeah, especially cause we weren't stitching them then too. So like you've got this thing that holds 20 kilonewtons, you can take apart with your fingers in like a second and put back together, you know? And then the UV is important for the coating. And then for this particular product, this we had to specially develop the tube. This isn't like off the shelf tubing either to be able to get something that fits through nicely and provides the UV protection that you want over time. They're super good enough. You want to say super good enough on camera or is that not legal? Super good enough. I think I already said it. It's super good enough. That's generally our goal. Super good enough. You can imagine how much fun it was for me to see other people's brake test machines and get to nerd out with other nerds on gear. So now we'll break just a few old Camelots in our slow slack snap machine. Oh, that's a cool result. That is shocking that this did not get cut, especially when you see the forks. Oh, that's amazing. Oh, never mind. They're they're right. It just is different than a C4. Or a modern C4. A modern C4, yeah. This thing didn't break. It was doubled up and this cable broke. Still completely functional. Completely. Besides that. Tens high enough to have damaged the lobes or axle. I think it got damaged on the carabiner. This was hiding like here. Yeah. Well, it is damaged. I'm not saying it's in great shape. But this was a carabiner. Not that sharp. Unless it flipped. It could have flipped. So this is a Camelot number one. And most people, like myself, only Black Diamond made Camelots. This is a Chenard Camelot, which I didn't know was a thing. And I think is very, very sad and wrong that we're thinking about breaking it. We're going to break it. Very cool piece of climbing protection history here. So this completely like slipped and came through, which means the axle is completely jacked, probably. And then this cable was the final grand finale, which is what I'm expecting out of quote unquote full strength. Actually, that looks very functional. So it slipped at 11, and then the wire broke at 11. Weird. This is my Camelot number five that I stopped using after I thought the sling was getting scary and the trigger was broken. These larger cams actually are rated less, which makes sense because you have these big lobes torquing on the axle. There's the fear that they'll collapse. I believe this is the strongest way you can place these big cams. We call this an umbrella placement, and it's basically a passive placement that you could do at the top of a crack, like a flake at the top of a crack. I don't see people placing stuff like this a lot, but you could do it. I'm afraid it would move or fall. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Bobby, it shot at you. Oh, it is the strongest. It ripped it out of the. So you can see here they were starting to deform. And when you would actually place it, I think you would see failure a lot lower. Oh, that is strong. All right. That's a great finale for our cams.