Does climbing gear pulling out soften the blow on the next piece?

Oh my... That was too long! This is a fun toy. So, we want to know if sketchy pieces are worth placing, even though they might not hold. If they make you feel better, they might be worth placing. But will they actually soften the catch on the piece that does catch you? So we are going to put, instead of a dog bone, we're going to put some catnip. This of course is going to break, but will it help absorb some of the energy before it gets to the final actual dog bone that we have at the master point? Our first test hit the ground, so we need to shorten her up a little bit. Okay, this is our line scale 3 protected when it falls and lands on this guy half the time. And we have this reading at 1280 hertz, which is super fast enough for a dynamic loaded test. And we've got our catnip is also going to be reading at 1280 hertz, or 1280 times per second, to find out when this starts to catch and then this catches. And we're just going to shorten the rope on our next test. Because that first test didn't go so well, we'll test it proper on the one dog bone and it not hitting the ground, find out what force it is. And then we will start adding some compromised pieces. I'm Ryan Jenks, and I want to know if I put in crappy trad gear when I climb, it's going to help soften the blow on the piece that hopefully catches me. We've made extremegear.org look even better since the last time I made a video, and you can get 20% off for 20 hours on any quickdraws we have on there. The code is going to be hidden on... So go over there, flit your way through there, it's going to be pretty easy to find. Now the first test we're going to redo because I want to know how much force we get without any of the catnip or the crappy pieces. Now our test dummy is a 75 pound steel weight, and that's probably the equivalent of a 100 pound person. Because I'm a bag of water, I flex, move, and compress when I fall. The steel weight doesn't. We'll eventually get some pretty cool dummies. And the rope is attached to a grigri attached to the post because I don't know, why would you want to stand under this falling chunk of metal? And for every single test we do, we drop it from the exact same height. So this rope goes into our catnip, to our second catnip, to our dog bone. Three, two, one. What broke? We did not redo the grigri. Damn it! Science is hard! But we did pick up the peak force on the catnip before it broke. The steel weight saw 1.33 kilonewtons before it completely fell and hit the ground. Now on our third test, when we finally did it right, the catnip saw 1.79 and the steel weight saw 3.18 when it finally stopped. But check out this graph. It starts at 0.33, which is the weight of the item, goes into complete weightlessness, so it's zero, and then has three spikes on the graph before you get the actual final peak force when the dog bone catches it. That's super weird. I cannot figure out why that is. Put in the comments below why you think that is. I put pieces in to make me feel better, whether or not they slow down my fall for the piece that actually works. But the theory is working. It does slow you down a little bit. We're going to actually repeat this test to make sure the results are consistent. 1.92 kilonewtons on our catnip again. So pretty consistent results for our paracord little quick draw. And our dog bone is still faring well down here. We switched out our dog bone with an Irish wolfhound treat. And this is going to give us the reading here. And we're going to start with just this guy and no catnips. And then we're going to see what the difference is once we add some catnips in there. Oh, that is some violentness. What's interesting about this graph is on the second bounce, when the steel weight gets lifted up from the recoil, was 2 kilonewtons when it went back down. It's quite interesting to see the force in these live graphs and the Line Scale 3s give us that option because they record all of this internally. So we left the Line Scale 3 for the next test on the dog bone but added the catnips again so we could see if it reduced the force on that dog bone, which is the original point of this experiment. And we got 5.95 kilonewtons on that dog bone, which is a lot less, and 3.07 kilonewtons on the steel dummy, which is also a lot less. But we also got those three mystery spikes again, and there's only two catnips that are slowing it down on the way down. So what you have to debate with yourself is whether or not it's worth the energy putting in crappy pieces because if you wear yourself out, well, then you're going to fall. But an interesting case study is when I was on the Leaning Tower climbing the Roulette A3 Plus to do our Dan Osmond rope jump, I basically unclipped all of the bad pieces that I put in in a row in order to not rip them out of the wall, which means I would have to place them in again if I fell. They weren't going to do me any good. I'm plenty high off the ground. Lots of dynamic rope in the system. I would rather just fall a little harder in that case. But every case is different and I was going straight up, so having gear in that I'm not clipped to made sense in that context. But with this test, we can conclude that we did see significantly lower force when we did have two pieces of gear that blew before it hit the dog bone. The 20% off for 20 hours discount code for Quickdraws is going to be found embedded on my hownotto.com slash shop page. You can see all my affiliate links in there, the products that I love, and that's how you can support this channel if you buy the gear you see on there. Now, this test does not really simulate real life forces that you see when you're lead climbing. The Grigri was fixed to the post. We had a steel weight and you can see in this video here where we tested lead forces found in a typical climbing gym scenario and we're actually coming out with another one soon, so make sure you hit the subscribe and bell notification button so you don't miss that. And by the way, the Grigri never slipped and no one was hanging onto the tail. We had a knot behind it so we can identify if it slipped at all and it did not. So, fun fact. All the data and information from this video is going to be in the description. When you're down there, check out the affiliate links and make sure you hit that like button on your way down. Cheers.