Not all climbing anchors are bomber

We're going to test some Webolet anchors today. Adrian Torchiana sent them to me and they've been used since 2006. I think he retired this in 2018. So it's been in his closet, I guess, for five years. They seem to be in OK shape, but I'm going to show you how they're used. So you understand how we test them. If you have a three point anchor, this is where they really shine because they're quite long. As you can put non-locking carabiners here at the bolts. And it's nice to face the gates down. If you have a chain link in here, it's nice to go underneath so you're not smashing it down. And you can actually use it later as well to clip a personal anchor or something. This is not a continuous loop. A lot of slings you have are in a loop form like this. These are two someone eyes or two figure eights. If you have cordelette, you can clip the outside ones with the eyes and the inside is going to just make this W. Take this and jiggle it around. You find it so all these are even and you can tie an overhand knot or a figure eight. Since it's quite long, I'm going to just do a figure eight. And you have two bunny ears here. So this is redundant in case one gets cut. This is redundant in case this gets cut. This is redundant in case one falls out. So it's redundant. Now, is it strong? Well, we'll find out. This has one leg rather than see how this has two, two pieces of webbing in this leg. Most anchors you build with a sling are going to have. Two components for every leg, which technically should make them stronger. But does it matter? We will find out here at the bottom. You typically would use one locker or two, depending how aggressive you will be with this thing. Sometimes if you're just top roping, you don't do it for safety. You add a second one in here. So you have a nice, better end radius here at this master point. Now, if you go off to the side a little bit, this is now going to see no force and it's going to put all the force on this side. Now, is this perfectly equalized? It's not perfectly equalized. The thing that is most in line is going to see more force and the closer bolts are going to be. That's how you make a perfectly equalized anchor. The closer bolts and the center bolts kind of cancel each other out. We have a whole high line series on that because that matters in a high line anchor, not in a climbing anchor. Any one of these components should be holding you. This is always just to be about redundant. Most things are super strong enough when you're climbing. Anyways, let's set this up in a slack set machine like this and see what it does. So the way I've set this up is I have a sliding X sliding B going to this rigging plate. And this rigging plate allows us to put these three anchor points here. And it's all coming evenly to a figure eight that I've tied on this one. As carabiners are not strong enough typically to break an anchor. So I put a soft shackle in here. This typically will break around 60 kilonewtons. And I bet you this is not going to do that. And then I got these even bigger soft shackles. And this is to catch it. And as soon as it extends all the way, it'll lock up because it's an ASAP. And then I've protected my load cell with this guy here. Now, this only goes up to 50 kilonewtons. This one without having to get into the other piston that's underneath the machine. And we'll see if it's stronger than that. So this anchor plate ended up working pretty good. But you can see like this is in a loop form, right? One, two, three, four strands versus one, two, three, four. I don't know. It's four against four. So but that broke lower than a carabiner is rated for good old carabiners like 23 kilonewtons, right? So ideally, you want your master point to be stronger than just one carabiner you've got on it. Now, one of the things you want in an anchor is strong, right? Serene, strong, equalized, redundant. But 20 kilonewtons is plenty strong enough. Your rope's going to either break you or break before this would break. So it's technically super good enough. I just think that's really funny because as a highliner, we build anchors that are like 60 to 100 kilonewtons. But even that's overkill. OK, so I got my three points. I'm going to slide up to right here. I'm going to do a figure eight again. And I'm not going to cinch it up too tight, so that way everything stays mostly equalized. And then we'll push that out and get those two connected. This one's a little stronger. You can see that it broke in the knot at the top of it. So these two strands are fine. That makes a lot more sense that you've got four against one, two, three, four. Here, it's good enough. So I've got only one more of these. And so instead of tying an overhand, I think I'll do something a little bit more interesting. If I think my climber is coming up this direction and I tie my EFK, take that knot in an eight here. In this direction here, but then they end up coming from this direction because the route wanders or a whole host of reasons. Then all the force is now on this leg and then this leg is super loose. This leg is medium. Now, this is going to tighten up quite a bit. So I think these two are going to share the load and this is going to see zero of the load is my theory. We're going to find out how much weaker it is when it does that. And this is just focusing on the strength of this anchor. It also is now putting more force on this piece. And if this is a cam or a nut you're worried about, bolts are not really an issue. Then you're putting more force on something when you're not trying to. That's the whole point of a three point anchor. It's the key of serene equalize. OK, I got to three kilonewtons. This one's pretty tight. This one's medium. And this one actually has a little bit, but not that much. So loose, tight, medium. I've never had that happen before where the knot ceases to exist. Not quite like this. So it did break pretty good. Let me show you the graph. You can see that it got up pretty high, but then it still held 10 kilonewtons when we had the other piece on it. It didn't shock load the other piece, right? There's still some there was some tension on here. It kind of self equalized a little bit because this was seen a little bit more force than I thought. This was completely loose when I started. The knot is gone and it kind of just broke it in the series. You can see how the weak link was the knot. So even if you only have two pieces pulling, it's still almost the same strength down here, like the anchor itself. The problem is you're only putting force on a few of your pieces, but then you have yet other pieces of backup. Cool. As far as other stuff, Adrian sent me our slings with the same age. And here we have a dyneema sling and a nylon sling. The dyneema sling is 22 kilonewtons and made in the year, I assume 2006. I don't see a date. The nylon is also rated for 22, and it does have a date 2006. Now I could pull these end to end, but I think in the spirit of the anchor video we're doing, I think it'd be kind of fun to tie an LFK, a little fat knot and see what kind of results we get just with these. This is a little anchor. Normally it's a double length sling, but I made it work. 13.70. How interesting. That's not very strong. That's half the strength of a carabiner. Granted, it was old, so take it for what it's worth. All right. That is way too small of a sling to be doing that. Looks like it broke in the knot and part of the knot came undone, and I think that's what this is. It's pretty crunchy on the end. That feels quite warm and melted. Check this out. This is a perfectly equalized one point anchor. Get it? We're just going to pull end to end to see how this compares to the last test, because I had another one of these. 27.75. Warning, climbing is dangerous. Looks like it's missing part of the tag. Now, when you tie a sling in a knot, you're going to get 50 percent. But if you do that V shape anchor, you in theory get double. So usually you get 50 percent of double or you get about the same. But in this case, we got a lot more strength out of just pulling it straight than we did in an anchor, which is funny. One solution I've actually done in the past is if I have, let's say, two extra slings on me, and I don't always take too much gear. I just use two slings to make my anchors. And that way, they're a little bit beefier and more redundant and doesn't weigh nothing. I already have it with me. And if I don't have it, it's also not that big of a deal. Usually with an anchor, you have somebody following you or you're repelling and we're top roping. And you're never really going to get more than one or two kilonewtons on that thing. The real danger is when you climb and start the second pitch, where you have a risk of falling past your player, where you start to increase the forces because the amount of rope you have in the system is a lot less relative to how much you're falling. That's when you get into the fall factor ones and fall factor twos. And I actually now that I've done the static rope whipper tests and and other personal anchor tests that I have still yet to edit, I'm actually thinking about carrying shock absorbers with me or screamers, climbers call them. And you're actually using them. They're typically made for like really hard aid when you want to fall on micro gear. And it's not you don't think it might hold. So you want to put a screamer on there to shock absorb how much force that thing is actually getting. Just great. But I kind of also want to shock absorb me and I can maybe benefit from that. I'm going to actually do some experimenting. If one shock absorber or even the first two pieces as you leave an anchor might be beneficial. Now, of course, you don't want to do that when you're near the ground, because if it extends to absorb your force, then you're going to hit the ground and you'll have zero force on that quick draw. Get it. Let me know if you like this type of content. I kind of just have fun winging it, breaking stuff that people send me. And if you want to send me your stuff, go to the contact page of hownotto.com and buy gear. You know where to get it. 10% supports us. Cheers.