Aid Climbing - Hooking and Nutting

do you like my rack if you have a double or triple set of everything in order to climb El Capitan but you don't know how to stick it in the Rock you're not going to go up the rock this video is how to place all of this different type of gear and whatever we don't cover in this will be in the Big Wall Bible which is the bigger project to these videos I'm also going to include in the video some of the brake tests along the way so you can know that you can trust certain placements and that you really shouldn't have too much gear fear until you get into the really small stuff you can just get on it so in case you don't know if you put something in the rock that holds you without using a hammer then it's considered clean climbing so you have C1 C2 C3 and even C4 which is pretty damn hard but if you have to use a hammer to smash it in it is not clean climbing and that's where the a1234 A5 come in and that's where things could get spicy if you have to hammer Aid now as we get newer technology we are able to do routes that required a hammer in the past without using the hammer they call it the stove legs on the nose because they were literally smashing in stove legs in there and now you can just use that guy now all the years that they were using a hammer did change the Rock and you have these pods that are kind of awkward shaped but now that we've got aliens and totems and other cams these days that have a great shape of a lobe they're more narrow of a head and they basically they just fit really well and we're going to show you how to identify that in this video okay this is completely busted I literally just saw the fact that this thing's all bent up meaning only two lobes are even pulling which is a great segue to thank my patrons who do support what we're doing with one dollar per episode on patreon because if a thousand people do that I'm able to make content infinitely without worrying about the cost of it now if you can't afford it or just don't want to pay for it that's the point don't worry about it that's why it's free if you can like And subscribe I really appreciate that because that doesn't cost anything but I want more people to learn big Walling how their gear breaks and that's actually really bad I learned that they can just trust the systems and focus on enjoying the climbing the caving the canyoning whatever they're doing right but it feels a little weird to live on donations so I am trying to be a real YouTuber and live off sponsorships which brings me to another segue into rocky-talkie I should go get one of those thank you try enough enough product placement there climbers invented a walkie-talkie that actually works when I need it to now don't click out of this hear me out I struggled a lot for two reasons I didn't bring enough water I didn't have one of these water's mostly free now at noon every day on El Capitan there is a lot of wind and if you can't hear your partner and anything out of the ordinary happens it's very difficult difficult it's very difficult to communicate anything unique to your belayer or your leader these things are lightweight the battery lasts a really long time and they're super reliable which I never had in the past and had many epics because of it you know our new website I just released I spent like nine months working on it and I didn't have time to keep working on that and make this course and so they pay or finish paying for that project you can hit several of the filters on our content page and filter out exactly what you want to see because the content I make isn't intended for everyone to enjoy I just am bouncing around between the sports and it is nice to cross-pollinate them but I really appreciate them investing in the website and in this course because I think it's going to help a lot of people now let's start with my new favorite cam totems let me show you a totem what's really cool about a totem I'll show you how to place in a second is you only have to place two lobes and you can clip this and it'll hold body weight and if you clip both it'll hold full weight now it's not likely you want to do that if you're gonna clip your rope what the sling is for and you can clip this and if you want it to be shorter you can clip that and if you're trying to Aid climb you can clip up here to get yourself higher so if I were to clip my rope I'm going to want to put it lower or put a quick draw on it and if I'm going to be going at an angle of course I would add more of an extender so that's how I would clip myself to this piece but just know that totems are awesome because the shape of that lobe the metal grabs the rock really well and it fits a more variety of places so let me show you how that works is you don't cam it all the way to where the tips are past each other somewhere in that range is great and if it goes here awesome you just put it in deep enough to do its job but not so hard that you can't get your fingers on this trigger for the follower to take it out now if you're scared you might want to squeeze it too much the lobes are crossed and it's going to look like that making it kind of harder for the follower to clean especially if it rocks you can see it's going up and there's no more movement for the cam to squeeze to get smaller to pull it out keep it in that sweet spot right there and listen to this versus if I place this here this rock could explode and then the opening is too big for the cam to hold if I do just go down here just a little bit more I could if you see the lobes are not crossed but this is a solid rock and this is a solid rock so be mindful of where you're placing it not all rock is created equal if for some reason this is all I could get because it was a shallow placement then I could clip this Loop here and it would hold my body weight and then I could Aid past this section oh hey there we go one spring left [Music] wow rest in peace we're gonna test what one side can do so it broke the cable where it meets the lobes I'm pretty happy with that here's a yellow totem or is similar to a gray alien and you can see these finger pods uh size crack and you can see it changes from bigger to smaller bigger smaller now you don't want to place this where you're going to want your fingers now luckily I have a finger pot up here that I can lock off to but if you're free climbing of course you don't want to fill that in and then you have nowhere to put your hand so right down here I can place it and you can see just how beautiful of a spot that is because this rock is solid and this rock is solid and what I like to do is I like to place these in a way that is almost treating them like a nut so in this case I go up and it goes in easily but then when I pull it down it kind of sits there beautifully and if you try to squeeze it and pull it straight out it doesn't come out and cams can slip it albeit higher forces that's how it fails and the cam pressure most often in the lab so this just gets me excited and it's easy enough for my cleaner to squeeze go up and then out so in down bomber and that's actually holding really well on these two lobes these ones are moving quite a bit another thing that's a really good trick is to flip it upside down because you can see that these two lobes on the inside sometimes just doing this will make it fit better and if you wiggle it you can see how they're kind of tipped out on the bottom and okay on the top so the blue totem is a very common one I actually carry three on my rack but black totem blue totem and great yellow totem are the three very common piton sizes one thing to kind of note is when you place them their range is a little bit different than a C4 where you would typically goes like to nose to 90 degrees but these actually go a little bit at that point to a little bit wider but past that starts being over camped so this would be a perfect blue uh totem placement that's the size as it enters I have to pull it in I would not even place I would not bounce it I would just clip it and go yeah that's amazing um if I sit this in a little bit more you can see it sits a little bit wider but that is still a good totem placement this is a black totem placement up against the crack there you can kind of see the size comparison as I pull it it is oh there it is it's a little bit tight on a black totem but it that'll definitely hold really well so some micro cams are some black diamond c3s and they're called c3s because there's three lobes on each one and also can be called tcus but Metolius has a cam called TCU so it can be a little bit confusing either way it has a much more narrow head that will allow to fit in some tinier cracks not every crack perfectly parallel sometimes it's just like shaped into a pod and if you have a wide micro cam it's not going to always fit now the plastic here doesn't allow it to bend great and so the Z4s is a four low version now that has the same width which is really great but anyways if you ever see these this is what they are let's get into my crack here so it doesn't quite fit while it's open and so it fits like that if it doesn't go in before it's expanded there's a chance it'll hold but I'll be at a small chance that's actually a great place when I would get on that one I wouldn't bounce test that very much before just committing to it that's solid in a horizontal placement it fits right there just fine it's and it bins over the edge super good enough will this damage your cam probably but hey got you up the route so no wires straight up broke right on that edge what are those this is called culture you have to know these exist just because they did these are called link cams or what I used to call them as oh cams because if this doesn't fit you can go oh and it just it's a Transformer cam it just gets smaller smaller smaller smaller now they tend to walk that means when they go like this they'll go into the crack deeper and deeper so they're also expensive and pretty damn heavy can I make them anymore don't think they make them anymore yeah what's cool is also for math nerds uh it's the golden ratio this is the golden ratio yep but those are Matthews all right if you're a math narrow this is the golden ratio whatever that means okay that doesn't go in you can just keep squeezing it and it will where I found these to shine is when I'm trying to climb the boot flake or something I'll take two of similar sizes and because they overlap so much I could just lift this up sit on it lift my uh eighter up stand on it and just kind of Ascend up the entire crack without ever having to go over the other cam which smashes into the other one it's very fast they don't make them anymore but you can find them fixed in cracks because they're so bad at getting stuck so this is my absolute favorite piece of gear this thing has caught me more times than any other piece of gear this is finger pods for me and this is a yellow Alien aliens have a wonderful Bend radius and the shape and type of metal and everything just fits and you Yosemite cracks where I climb the best and before this before the totems it came out so now that's kind of like uh I don't know which one I like more now but in the same placement as the blue totem check it out so if I touch the crack here you can see that that just snugs right up in there doesn't move at all woohoo wood whip clean cut that cable 13.58 I don't think there's any wire left in there this metal is a softer metal right that's what makes it grab the rock better so an offset alien is where the thumb Loop is one color but the sling is another meaning and it's pretty hard to tell in the small one that this side of these two lobes is going to be smaller than these two lobes and that's in case you have a piton scar but not all cracks are parallel so you can snuggle one side into a smaller part of the crack and this guy can sit on the bigger part of the crack so you can see that the back lobes go in but these lobes won't but if I squeeze it and it gets more narrow in the back I can go in and then slot it sideways a little just like that now these inside lobes on this side are not going to be able to come out of that that's almost like a nut placement and so that's very bomber and it doesn't have a chance of slipping or anything and the way this cable is it sits over that edge quite nicely so I would leave this in and clip that to my rope so you can actually see on this bigger offset alien the difference between those lobes here now this is a red yellow alien however there is gray in between the two but so many piton scars this fits really well in putting the smaller lobe in the back of the piton but then you have gray red and you have yellow gray and you just have a combination of a bunch of the different sizes because well they work really well now something we didn't place in the cracks was the Black Diamond C4s and they're pretty awesome because of the double axle giving them quite a big range and the double axle allows it to be placed passively which I'm not quite sure how to get a stable placement like this but at least we found out it's super strong when you do and when we break these things in the drop tower the cam shoots straight out of the crack and they even have an ultralight version where this thumb Loop is made out of dyneema instead of a metal cable now those Ultra Lights kind of have an expiration date because dyneema doesn't last forever um not that anything lasts forever and the sling doesn't last forever but you can re-sling this but the dyneema you can't re thumb Loop it now they last five or ten years but I mean half the cams I have on my rack right now are 15 years old so uh we're gonna find out how well they don't hold up in about 15-20 years when they start to break on people anyways this is one of the brands of the cams that I keep on my rack I have the totems the aliens and these now keep in mind if you squeeze this thing all the way and shove it in a crack well the only way to get it out is to squeeze it a little bit more so try not to get those tips to cross at the end because that that's called overcoming doesn't mean it's unsafe it just means your partner is going to like you less or you'll have less cams now here's a great example of how a cam can be placed in your home I actually sent this picture to Andrea and said hey can you draw this for me and I believe that was our first shirt with her designs on it and then she added a climber climbing the can and she also added it to leggings which looks really cool and so you can see all of that on how not to swag.com and I love El Capitan shirt now let's get into hooking all right so I've arrived at a small seam here and I could either try to put in a really small micro cam here or a small micro nut but instead on Aid climb you're trying to move as fast as you can and you don't always need to have a bunch of pro so what you can use is a cam hook to move through a section so you want to choose the right size cam hook for the crack here we're going to start with this medium sized one and you can just put it in here and when you pull down what it does is it pivots so this bottom part is pushing against The Rock here the top part is pushing that direction so the bottom is pointing that way the top is pointing that way and then I can pull down on that on the gate head there right there and it's going to be plenty strong enough for weight placement uh you would not really want to take a whipper on it no not a bomb replacement but a bomber a to placement this is something you would see in like C2 type of placements and Terrain oh yeah Metals this might be up to five that is not the shape it's supposed to be so well three to four could also place them inverted straight up under a roof or in a horizontal crack they Flex a lot in this position and can feel pretty insecure at first but when you get used to them they're actually quite stable as you weight the cam hook it pushes outwards on either side of the crack which locks it in place be careful not to use the smaller size inverted it's much weaker than the others and we'll probably It Ain't Easy hooking in the valley it's a little bit easier to be able to see terrain that you have a hook move coming up but the idea is instead of having to put your hand on a hold and trying to crimp on a tiny little hold like this tiny crimper like totally like single pad dude I'm gonna use a uh Cliffhanger here and so what I want to look at is these can kind of brace against the side and that's what you kind of want to look for is those aware marks on the Rock from that over time people wearing it in but this pretty much just becomes a crimper for you and you can just pull down now one thing is it's really nice of you uh actually file the tips of these because it'll actually get a better placement if you file it at a 45 degree angle on the right and the left but you just pretty much place it on there and then you can weight it now this thing even if you duct tape it and leave it as Pro um you can do that but just keep in mind that it can only it'll start bending upwards and actually come off at about two kilonewtons which you definitely generate more uh rocking your portal Edge at night with your partner um so not quite good enough to hold alright so this is another type of placement I could use where it's a small little flake in there and it's still doing the same job you could still press on that and it's still going to stabilize and press against that flake uh when you're in flakes like this you do want to keep in mind that it could actually still pry off flakes so make sure you're doing it in good quality flakes in case you're curious what A4 looks like that's it reading now 2.32 wow 2.73 and it opened up this is my big pecker that I love showing people it's bent a little bit weird but it still does the job so the key is to slip it into a crack while nobody's noticing and sometimes this is a little bit too wide of a crack for this but this is just a hand placement so it could still be considered a C1 C2 if it's a hand placement if you don't need a hammer for it and this also does include a little soft tap with the hand so if I did a little soft tap with the hand I should still be able to get some weight on it so I'm going to actually weight this piece let's see ready I'm waiting it so it's spooky and I can hear it not a great placement and I would not really want to whip on this and there is no need if the cracks this big but this is just a show if the crack was skinnier this this is how it works so to get this thing out you would need to kind of wiggle it to get it out you hit there or hit the bottom and just kind of hit up and up and kind of just like get it to wiggle you don't want to hit down obviously because that would get the pecker more deep so you can also clip a sling here and Hammer out if you brought a hammer yeah if you brought a hammer uh other placements though you can get it into a small little seam let's see if I can get a good one um and what this can end up kind of acting like is a little bit more of like a cam hook because it's not just straight it can leverage and get some different twisting in it so here's a piton and you can see how wide it is and if anything's this big at this point you're typically able to use some more recent technology but sometimes you have a piton scar that you're able to utilize and if you take a piton and you cut half of it off then you have a sod off piton and a sawed-off piton goes in the shape of the rock quite well because that's what caused it to look like this today and these are super nice on the Zodiac they just slot in super well and uh hand place I never even used a hammer when I place this one sometimes it's nice to have different sizes or whatnot you can see that this one is a number four you can see that this one does not fit these weightless aliens we carry now and the totems weigh nothing Fred Becky bringing up 250 pitons out for some of the routes out in the Wind River range oh my God 250. take a minute and realize that I have 72 pieces of gear on me right here and it's not ironically all of my gear and it doesn't even weigh like 20 pounds it was such a feat for the original people to do the original things they originally did not just climbing just anything in general but like if you think of the climbers that pioneered this stuff for us and they took Stone legs and they took 250 pitons that's insane and it's just nice to recognize that uh what we're doing today is a lot easier then and of YouTube they didn't have ultra lights and they didn't have Micro nuts like they didn't have these they had to take beaks and blades and smash them into the thin cracks now we just put these in there well scars from doing that now this is an absolute ton of gear and all the cams that at least I like are on extremegear.org plus harnesses helmets headlamps a bunch of stuff almost 80 of everything you need when you go up a wall I would really appreciate if you're going to pay retail to go buy from there because 10 supports what we're doing and the rest of the proceeds support John ferroni's cave exploration projects so your money's going to go to really great places if you're going to go buy some really cool gear now let's show you how to play with your nuts so this is a micro nut uh it's actually called a RP oftentimes these same ones and it's a little bit of a softer metal so it's going to get a better bite in the rock as you can see it's offset here too um so it's kind of a different size throughout it yeah um and these are really good for these micro seams this one's rated for seven kilonewtons uh leaving this guy behind I have a lot of confidence placing it and then just stepping right on it no problem that is a good placement hopefully it's uh I can get that out super happy I got this out a little hammering a little nut tool and it looks like we got a six kilonewton NBS and a nine kilo Newton result I'll show you a really small placement uh if I can so I'm looking for where this thing right here kind of uh constricts really well um so I can place that in there and then I like to seat it down what I'm looking for in that is that I've got good uh contact on both sides and that is constricting as I pull it down and I'm still trying to pull it in the direction of pull um notice that I am pulling and giving you some good tugs um to seed it really well what not to do is if you wiggle wiggle wiggle and saw it all the way back there it's gonna be such a pain in the ass for the cleaner to get the nut tool in there that's not coming out if you are going to go like that that's definitely not going to come out but you try not to put it in too deep so here's an example of too big of a nut placement that I could still get in that is that I could still get that in there see how it's got contact on the left it's got contact on the bottom but where the meat where the saddle is on that nut placement it does not have contact in the top there so if you pull out a little bit it's going to come out all right so this is an example of a super micro nut and this thing is rated up to three kilonewtons and as you saw in our heavy bounce test even me you that's 140 550 pounds without gear I was still able to generate what was it 2.2 kilonewtons on a really hard bounce test you can actually almost blow these wires on a really hard bounce test and just because I can get it in there like that doesn't mean that that's gonna hold that little tiny little placement so just because I can get it to get stuck by hand placing it doesn't mean it's going to be able to hold uh actual weight when I hold on oh yeah this hole cracks a little too big for that but if it's not too big you can trust this with body placement we did actually break test these and because it's welded at the top and it's not bent like this you can this weakens it technically it always breaks you know more in this realm because it gets pinched down at the yeah bending this steel cable I have blown a wire yep um so just you know like this is ironically almost as strong as some of these Hannah can oh yeah and they're all like stronger than a camp this is a decent placement too I just want to emphasize the depth does not mean always better so those that are a little bit short it's okay size doesn't always matter oh my god um it's a matter about how you use it so uh it's got a really good contact on both sides here and it's still constricting down and it would be definitely solid enough for a good placement now you can get that out yeah I guess that's how you clean it right here check this out this is the same width on both sides okay um and that's not an offset that's just a nut um I prefer offsets yep I I have usually a double set of offsets so I'm going to be placing a larger set of nuts here um so there are two different ways you can place nuts in general is you can place it in this orientation you can place it in this orientation depending on where the swoop of the rock needs to be touching against The Rock otherwise sometimes that's not good enough and instead you need to place it in this orientation you can see how it also tapers down in that direction too so I can see that I've got a good taper here so I can actually place this in here and with a good tug here I've got really good contact on the right side I've got good contact in the left side and I can even see up at the top go ahead and look at the top there that it also looks really well too yeah so I like that placement I would clip that now the thing with nuts is you want to always be careful to not just clip it with a loose because in order to get these things out well all I have to often do is go upwards and it starts moving right and I might have to hit it so what you would want to deal oftentimes is attach to a longer sling like an Alpine To Nuts to protect that swoop up as you're pulling up and clipping the next pieces I have oftentimes seen one of my knot placements drop once I got to about the age of 13. wow okay so here's our next nut placement all right 9.6 kilonewtons is interesting and that the wire broke where the Carabiner was I just can't imagine that nut coming out of such a tight constriction but I was imagining this to be stronger so this is a nut tool I've seen how it's connected to me I like it on some kind of spring that I to get that spring so this is actually from rocky-talkie their Springs are also really good versatile tools besides are just the talking themselves so this is also inside of here you can kind of see that there's metal so it's not just like a plastic Loop there's metal wire inside which is really nice and then it just Clips back to me so it doesn't stay nice and long doesn't take up a lot of room on my harness but then I don't have to worry about dropping these so you can see that this is for to be able to hook things like being able to grab trigger wires from your cams it's kind of got a little blunt floors ability here I've also used this to like pry add pieces especially like a side profile of a nut you can get it inside the wires and then pry it like that like a lever and that oftentimes works that's not going to be what I use for this because I can't get to that yet there are some nut tools where the inside is actually a wrench where you can go up to a old loose bolt and you can tighten it this is not one of them but there are some that I've used where I can re-tighten a loose hanger which is kind of nice yep and then the top isn't oftentimes nice and flat and uh big so you can hit your hand and you're not trying to hit against this sharp metal you get a little bit more blunt with that you can use things like carabiners you can use things like a piece of rock your water bottle anything to get you a little extra force to be able to hit it out I've used my Alfie fee before oh wow yep because that's a big metal chunk of metal I can hit I've used my grigri before like anything that's hard that's not my hands micro fractures are emit yeah yep yep so I'm going to try to get this nut out I think it's going to be a little bit tricky that I'm not going to be able to do like an easy hit out like you can't just like oh why is it not coming out you really have to actually try a little bit you actually have to hit it hard and try to move it in different orientations and it'll oftentimes come out just really jab at it otherwise use a hammer yep if you're on an A2 A3 A1 and anything you brought a hammer for sometimes don't forget you have a hammer to actually hit things up remember it in you got to hammer it out yeah so I have uh use a nut tool as a hammer to essentially get one of my nuts so fixed that I was willing to let it be fixed forever because it was I needed a good placement to stay there so I just took one of my copper RPS put it in there and I pretty much mashed it in there good enough where it was fixed forever and then I was able to hold my body weight no problem but you used a hammer with your nut tool nope I just use my nut tool okay rivet hangers so I'm going to show you how to connect to a bolt that does not have a hanger that you can clip the carabiner to is there's a couple variety of wires that you can use these are called rivet hangers one side moves so technically both sides move and this kind of cinches up over a bolt stud now a lot of the bolt studs are a hex bolt smash into a hole and so you have a head to go over which is more secure than what I'm about to show you have you done this before though what on with one without a bolt on it 100 100 because sometimes they're just quarter inch Nubs that stick out I think the Aspire has one of these it's just like it's just a little rusty thing that you're like really like this guy uh yeah take a look at this I don't even see it so that's a good example of a scary rivet hanger but it is pointed up and this is the only one I clipped to uh this I do not clip to and that's what cinches up around it so this is cinched up as much as it's going to and I also have smaller ones these come in a variety of size so sometimes the bolt is so smashed in there's not enough space behind it to get this size of a cable in there so you do have to go with the smaller ones then to clean it you typically will pull this down and then lift it up and over the bolt head this is a bomber bolt stud without a nut and I still would trust it because like it's not going to come off especially if it's just body weight but I'll typically leave these sometimes for to protect me from a lead full so I've seen this on every route I've ever done so um it's nice to have a variety and it's nice not to have them all on one Carabiner this is one of the few things that I put in two different locations on a harness because if you drop them you're not going to get past it if you've dropped all your options on how to connect it this is a Moses hanger and you basically slip it over like a key Notch and uh so you guys are going to have somebody coming up okay that'll be fine we should be done by the time they get up here so this would go over the nut and then slip down behind so just pretend there's a nut here would go over that easily and then has to slide behind now notice it's taking up quite a bit of space it's not just the thickness of this metal but it's also how much the rock is pushing it out so if the nuts pushed back too far or this is smashed in too far this doesn't work but once you have that then you can take a carabiner and you can clip um down like that and up you want to make sure the spine is against The Rock like any piton that you would be clipping you don't want to clip this because it's Levering it out and pushing weird against the Carabiner it just doesn't sit natural natural there you go how not to do that what if you don't have any you didn't expect to see any then you could use a nut you might be able to hang from your nuts so this cable makes a loop look familiar go like that really feel nutty cinch it up there and you've got yourself a makeshift Red Hanger now the problem with this is this cable is pretty thick so you're not always going to have that space behind the nut the other thing is this is a lot taller and the rivet hangers are a lot shorter and what happens is it puts me this much further away from being able to stand up like that much more and every inch matters when you're playing with your nuts like that wasn't a good joke but every inch matters on how TOP Step you can reach the next thing you want to get as high as you can and if this thing's hosing You by another three four inches well and you're short now the remainder of this video is going to show you how to place Gear with a hammer and I just want you to know that we found a spot that no one's climbing at indicated by how much Moss there is because it leaves scars so it's important that you know not to hammer in gear where there are routes that can go clean there are still plenty of routes that require Hammers and so if you love smashing stuff go have at it but just keep in mind that it leaves an impact when you do that and we can't just climb on this for hundreds of more years with hammers and not have consequences or new improvements of cams now as far as the difficulty goes there's kind of an overlap on the C12 and 3 or clean climbing to a234 there's like A1 is like you there is no A1 you just freaking use what I have here if you're on A1 but when I was climbing A3 I actually found it substantially easier than climbing C3 on the Zodiac because when you smash in something albeit if it's thin it feels pretty solid but then you eventually can only go so far in the clean climbing to where when you're skinning into A4 plus then you're on such thin stuff that that hammer doesn't compensate for how sketchy it is now falling isn't really the risk in my mind when you are doing hard Aid it's what are the consequences if you fall so if you're over a ledge and some pretty high consequences now if you're doing C1 who cares this is not going to come out you can leave gear that will hold you every three feet if you want but when you get into the hard egg climbing the gear that you're placing is only for body weight barely so if you do put something in if you were to take a whipper on it you'd rip it out and so nothing's really holding you for quite a while which is fine if you're not going to hit anything but if you're doing this over a ledge you get some dfu pitches or don't f up so on this 183 pitch I was climbing it was going straight up and I knew everything I was placing wasn't going to hold me and I didn't have any screamers or shock absorbers that I could attach to kind of like mitigate how much it was gonna put on the actual gear which can't help but because I didn't have that and I didn't care because it was like overhanging I wasn't going to hit anything I don't care if I'm gonna fall another 10 or 20 30 feet if if I'm not going to hit anything the more rope out is actually a softer catch but I didn't want to unzip like 10 pieces in a row so I'd have to like what replace them if I am going to go back up so I have like the sketchiest bolt ladder ever that I've left in the thing and this only works if you're going straight up because my partner can just clean them they're in front of his face he's not going to miss them he's not traversing right as he's ascending and so I didn't clip any of them so I left my last good double zero cam placement down there somewhere and all the way up this thin part I didn't I didn't clip anything and I felt like that was the right choice for that section to not rip them all out but keep in mind most stuff that you're smashing in is can be pretty solid so you don't have to be too afraid of getting on it but you just can't use a hammer anywhere you want and I wanted to disclose that now I would love to have lots of images on the bolting Bible of gear that's placed in different ways or videos of even you placing pitons and heads in actual rock that you're actually climbing if you can ideally film don't know how you film that without fixing a pitch and having somebody film your top down but anyways if you guys want to contribute to what we're even showing you in this video because there's only so much we can cover in an hour uh please do so and submit that on the big wall bible stuff think how awesome this resource is going to be if we have a a lot of different people contributing different ways to do this stuff based on different viewpoints and different opportunities they have to develop things anyways don't forget that you can get 10 off your Rocky talkies let's go start smashing stuff we're going to show you how to place a piton clean routes nowadays replace the use of these pitons because oftentimes we can get clean gear where we could get pitons before so we're just going to show you how pitons could be placed but again if you can get clean gear in you should be using clean gear and not pitons so I've got two different placements I'm going to show you if I place this first one that thing just seats in right away and it's already up against the the collar so I need to go up to a bigger one and you can see as I place it in there it only goes in about a third of the way and what I want to do is I want to try to hit it and listen to the pings so as I hit it here [Applause] so that sound pretty much just stopped um and that's pretty awesome bomber I would whip on that any day uh you wouldn't clip to this though no no this is to keep it on the harness more conveniently as you can see there's about one finger width away from this eye and you can basically go up to the eye as long as you're hearing the pings yeah but if it bottoms out and you don't hear the high pitch ping then it's not bomber yes it caught it Jeremiah how do you get it out all right so I'm gonna put a locker in in the eyelet here and I have what's called a funkness device um what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be clipping it to the piton the big key though is as you're removing any gear you're never looking at it and trying to watch it you want to make sure they really Shield your eyes otherwise you're going to be having a sharp uh not sharp but well sort of pointy uh metal object coming right at your face so on the hammer uh it has a eyelet that's what makes these a special type of hammer also this nose is going to be used for copperhead placements and stuff later but you have a hole that's clipped and a cable um it doesn't actually have to be anything special you can actually hand make these if you need to um the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to wiggle this thing out by hitting this the sides so I can see that it's it's wiggling I like that that's what I really want to see that's what damages rocks and then I can clip it to it you don't want to pull on the nose though there you go yeah it's gonna happen whatever it is yeah it's not good for your wieners oh can you smell that you can smell the steel uh sparking as it comes off oftentimes gosh that's sketchy uh you want to bring up safety glasses um I don't wear them this is a Lost Arrow piton totally looks like the Lost arrows fire or where's the Lost Arrow spider named after I think Elijah is named after us so the bigger pitons are actually used a lot lot less because of the technology we have today but I found these to be pretty useful because sometimes stuff this thin is kind of hard to do clean but what I have over here is a crack that is going to put allow me to put it in about halfway you can see that this is an extremely popular route get it the joke okay this is not an established route yeah so so this looks like a fingertip placement kind of a thing and so what I'm gonna do is see if it goes in and it's about one-third the way so far I like how that's going so now whoa hey buddy yeah that felt a lot better when I was putting in that's uh prying the rock yeah well why is that because it's like an inch thick so there's my finger or scale something super interesting when we've tested pitons and cams in real rock is how much how often the Rocks fail but notice we didn't hear the pings the high-pitched um ping so that's not quote unquote solid but being orientated down I would totally get on this thing but it's definitely not a solid placement based on its sound but let's say I don't want it in there so I'm going to clip why this because that's your I didn't want to up mine again foreign it's just a brand new tiny Metolius um basically these damage the carabiners from just the funking and stuff now you're only getting well no you can get up to I think seven or eight kilonewtons on these things but it does damage them and because not only is it just the force that's on it but sometimes it catches like right there and can really compromise it I'm not going to use this for Life supporting stuff later back and forth loosens it up and you can see why we get pitone scars almost got it instant replay like pretend like you're trying to hit a nail in the sky I don't wear eye protection either now this is a knife blade because it's so thin uh it's great for thin cracks check out how thin this crack is and as I put it in there uh it barely wants to go in but let's see here this Loops out here so I can clip this later and I would sometimes put my I didn't want to drop anything like a person ink or something in this my spare one that's pretty good pretty good Pro tent if you're hitting this way you're not standing up high enough on your ladder it looks more like this make sure you open your mouth so you can taste the granite I would clip that just the way it is spine on that side when you clip pitons you don't want to clip that way because the nose could get pushed up against The Rock the other thing I can do is pull on my fuckness device as I hit it the trick is not to fall down the hill oh it's moving oh it's still holding yes yes what do we get Bobby 6.84 I just want to re-emphasize you don't always have to use pitons that I would get on that hesitating it's in there it's touching the rock right here it feels deep it doesn't move when I wiggle it and I know I'm just stepping up to the next spot easier for my cleaner takes less time does not damage the Rock and it's clean climbing which doesn't damage the rock as much reps were originally designed to be hammered into hairline cracks since beaks were invented the burp has become fairly redundant however they do still have an advantage over beaks in horizontal cracks if the crack is too shallow for a knife blade or a beak then try a burp push the Rope into the crack and tap it in with your hammer when you weight the Rope it will try to Pivot in the crack which holds it in place in much the same way as any other piton while ropes might be fairly or care in the horizontal crack they're not as good in a vertical crack in a vertical crack the Rope acts like a wedge relying on the outward pressure from the sides of the crack you'll have to hit it in fairly hard for it to be any good although there is a fine balance with this because ropes are very delicate as you weight the Rope it will either stay in place or if you didn't hit it in hard enough it will probably pivot around the constriction and fall out if you Hammer a rope in but it bottoms out pretty soon you could do a rip stack this isn't too bomber let me show you my big pecker real quick uh this is a Moses backer and it's a right pecker there's right straight and left so you can see that this is straight and then it bends over so you can get the cord and the cable to not interfere with the side of the rock let me show you this so so if the pecker is going to be smashed up against the wall you want to have a little room for this in order to do your thing now now if I place it right here where it's thin but gets tighter right here I could oh work it in and it stabilizes it right here and if I gave that a little tap with my number five that's technically clean climbing but if I were to hammer it because I'd get on that if I knew like I had some good stuff between me and a ledge I'd get on that and I bounce test it right but if you were a little scared you do that and you're not going anywhere and that's not clean climbing okay now if I want to get that out I'm going to tap and then tap down here and then pull outward while I tap hold outward while I tap and work it back out the way it was put in do you still need to use a funkness on it sometimes if you can get a connection back here you can Funk or you can clip this and you can Funk the bottom and then you can smash it in you're basically having to open up the crack to get it in which is just terrible another option I have is it goes no no and yes already sitting on this so it's only going to go in more let's do that so that's actually pinging better than my other Lost Arrow yeah hit it one more time it is sounding way better it's a thin flake but depending on which way you're standing on it it's not prying it out this way it's going down much more so it's yep it's uh less tapered right so now I could I mean that's not coming out I'd fall on this yep but to get it out sucks for the follower I'm gonna pull and make sure you have some sort of a clip in or something so if it uh comes out all of a sudden you know and oh my pecker came out guess how you do a left one same way so I'm going to show how to do a copperhead placement these are typically going to be left there permanently so you are pretty much fixing this very malleable nut into a wall that doesn't really oftentimes have a crack and then these are going to be left there a lot of time you don't oftentimes try to clean these um and you just leave them for the next party there are means to be able to remove them um but they're pretty much destroyed once you do so this is called a copperhead actually this one is a copperhead and this is referred to it at the same but it's obviously not copper it's aluminum aluminum is better in Granite and just has a better stickiness to it and then there are all different sizes you can do two crimps you can do you can do a three crimper um there are sizes just like nuts too so you do want to make sure to kind of match up with your size of your crop there are some small small ones as well as well as ones for horizontal placements usually you use these when there is nothing else that works um and oftentimes where they blow is either they don't stick or the cable itself breaks and what I often find is on a lot of trade routes in Yosemite that the head is actually in good condition but about half the wires are blown off which can be kind of spooky Standing On Top of when you blow that and all that's left is just the the sticky metal part on the wall that's called a deadhead oftentimes if the cable breaks and this is still stuck under the wall um it is still gonna be stuck there but remember that it's not stuck because of mechanical means and it's not stuck due to constrictions like a nut is but instead friction actually so it's very easy for these things to pop off if they're not placed well but you could take a pecker and put it on top of this thing and balance on it but keep in mind that this thing could leverage it and pop it off if I was here and I had a seam that was like this that would be a very similar scenario to where I see these plate replacement but I need a little bit more of like a little uh divot in here not necessarily a crack but maybe a divot I could get this better in um but this would be similar to a a corner that you would see where you would have to use one of these this is the placement that I'll be using right here will be my placement now again I understand that I probably get some other pieces of Pro in here but I'm just going to use it for an example the first thing that I want to do is I need to be able to clean this rock up so I already tried to do my best with my brush to try to speed up this process but you would try to clean this crack as best you can all in all around it here clean it up so you know I'm going to take my my fake brush right now and I would try to clean that up to try to get as best adhesion as possible so it's try to be nice and clean then the next thing I need to do is I need to determine which side of this I need to use well you can see at the bottom of the cable here is the wire side and then where it's pinched up there I need the top to be facing like this there you go like this and not like this I do not want to do this placement I want to be doing that placement that's the type of placement I want I want to have that wire sticking on the outside the next thing is I I want to try to make this nut look like that crack so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to heat this thing up and we'll be heating it up by getting it malleable I want to be really careful not to be hitting the wire right now but I want to try to make this malleable and I want to start kind of shaping it similar to what that crack looks like so I can kind of see starting to kind of somewhat look like it it's a little bit fat here so I'm using the wall as like my uh Anvil yep all right so I'm liking that it's getting a little bit softer there we go so I'm liking that it's getting a little bit better where I can start getting it to kind of fit that a little bit better so I'm going to now try to drive it in there a little bit better wire if I can see how it looks oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so I'm using the nose of the hammer to start with to kind of start now I'm going to kind of finish it off using my actual chisels now too so show me show me show me how do you attach your chisel oh so I did a uh finishing knot here duct taped onto a piece of string up to my Carabiner you can buy kit I just made my own kit gotcha so chisel time chisel time so I'm going to try to do a better job shaping now I'm going to go down to other sizes that's why it's permanent yeah so I'm using a blunt chisels I don't really want it to cut I want it to match mash and mangle sounds like a band name mash and mangle it's a lot easier when a phone's in your way right all right I think that's uh okay placement this is probably a two one and a half star placement out of three so for those that are Pros I'm still learning how to place a lot of these and needing more experience so just letting you know if you want to film yourself putting in a head uh in your backyard yeah not on a trade route or anything send it uh to us on the add-on to contribute the page of the big wall Bible and we'll include your beta as well I hope to add a lot of people's information on the big wall Bible I'm gonna try to Funk this thing and I think I'm gonna try to break the cable ah science so I just want to show that I this can hold your weight um so I am actually on an a bladder right now yep you are on an aid lighter on a hill yep top stepping this thing so that's all it needs to be able to hold is just your weight but again it is pretty easy to get these things out and the next party's wait and the next party's wait and the next party's wait there we go get this thing out all right yeah that's the other thing is you're trusting some random person you never met that they put this thing in there when you step on them so just gonna be aware you know you have to assess them but like I said a lot of the ones I get on are the wires are all kinked out and rusted the head placements over good holy you can see that it really meld uh to the what the rest of the crack kind of looked like but that's all it was actually holding it was just like friction welded to it yeah yeah yeah so on the back side even though it looks matched on that one side it's it's only those points that are touching it you want to try to get as much uh uh contact as possible so because there was an actual opening in the back I couldn't get this to be in that but yeah yeah that was probably under 2K in that would not have held the fall but oftentimes these aren't going to these just need to be able to hold your body weight oftentimes the Copperheads are used for that reason I want to know how much force I'm generating while I'm trying to remove a piton 2.7 kilonewtons nine four

Channel: HowNOT2

Views: 140,313

Keywords: Highline, highlining, highlines, slackline, slacklining, slacklines, ryan jenks, how not to highline, hownottohighline, highliner, slackliner, tutorial, how to, rope, webbing, weblocks, rigging, rig, balance community, extreme, SlackSnap, Dynamometer, slow motion, break test, bolt buster, boltbuster, break tests, stunts, world record, slo mo, Slacktivity, climbing, science, mythbusters, carabiner, daredevil, rope swing, rope jump, jackass, alex honnold, big wall, gear, climb, rappel, spacenet, cams, anchors

Id: vyi12mZw1kI

Length: 60min 48sec (3648 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022