Girth and Clove at the Belay Station - Static and Dynamic Testing

hi everyone this is ian kamir of bliss climbing and today i want to change your mind completely on a girth hitch at the belay station or maybe a clove hitch at the belay station the question is whether it's redundant or not look at this one it's a girthic that slips at a very low 1.2 kilonewtons now do i have your attention if you have not seen that method then you should probably look into it but if you have and maybe you're using it look at that so the method that we see the most over the internet and probably the most used is the girth itch in a 60 centimeter soon sling so i just attached it to two locking carabiners like this and then i lock them and then i take a master point locking carabiner that i put girth itch so i pass both both strings here in the carabiner i pass the carabiner inside the loop that i created and i pull in order to use this kind of setup you close your master carabiner that's the here and then everyone will clip in that master carabiner here with a separate locking carabiner and if you want to belay a second directly on the anchor you will clip the atc or the grigri right there in that master carabiner and the question is whether it's redundant or not if it unclips or the sling gets cut on one side then if it slips entirely if it's a little bit loose or the forces are enough it will completely go off the system so there has been a few tests and i will show you what's available so some pull tests have been done by walter siebert initially and you can see with nylon he got to 14 kilonewtons look and assuming one of the eyes fails one of the anchor points fails what happens assuming one of the anchor point fails well not really if it fails the carabiner is still there if it slips the carabiner will hit the knot no big deal the real problem comes when the carabiner unclips or the sling cuts or maybe the carabiner [Music] [Applause] breaks [Music] [Applause] and then he did a very short test with an extremely slow pull with a dyneema sling he got 12 kilonewton so he called it good look so we have here 3.2 kilo newton six kilo newton the girth hitch doesn't slip at all okay we have here now 10 kilo newton at 10 kilo newton in that test i suspect that if the sling was cut it would go through but because of the small loop it doesn't okay now we are on 12 kilonewton and i stopped because it will break and so now all the guides they use that technique you can see it in autovox videos look at this extract i then pull downwards on all the strands running through the protection points and create a big girth hitch on the strands into which i clip my central carabiner i can then hook both my personal anchor and partner belay for my follower into this central carabiner what's up dave lotman with northeast alpine start and i'm going to show you how to use a girth hitch for equalizing a two a three and a four point anchor um typically when i'm confronted with a two point anchor like two bolts or something i usually always reach for my mini quad um but i've started to uh get on the bandwagon with the whole clove hits thing so pretty simple we're gonna clip both pieces pull down a little bite between the two like we were gonna do some kind of sliding x and then i'm gonna take a large carabiner and i'm just gonna girth itch the whole carabiner and then pull it tight in the direction of pull and then a clove hitch very similar method look at brent peters so you know brent peters converted to the girthich as of today but then let's look at ryan jenks that did a pull test that triggered my attention all right pull it bobby you see it's slipping around three four kilonewtons which is not a lot for a belay station even though he had pulled the knot initially at four kilonewtons so a very hard pole that should cinch the knot but then he was able to continue pulling i wanted to know will it slip and endanger people so i asked walter siebert if he could do some tests for me specifically on the mahmood contact eight millimeter sling and he did look at this one it's a girth itch that slips at a very low 1.2 kilonewtons good evening everybody we are in the second lockdown in vienna it's time to do some tests here is a brand new sling it bothers me always to do tests with new slings but sometimes it's necessary to sacrifice something to [Music] help the community to stay safer and he did another one that pulled around 4.4 kilonewtons look [Music] two three four [Music] four three two and what i had in mind is to create maybe a new kind of knot look it's a combination of sliding x and gertich i call it the gert x so like normal both sides are clipped but now i do a sliding x like this i make sure the stitching is up and inside the sliding x i do a girth edge like this and now it's it looks very similar but it pulls very differently inside the nut if it unclips then if it slides entirely it slips like this but it remains in the system it's still tied because it's the principle of the sliding x much better and same thing between the clove hitch the master carabiner will completely come off or the clove x where it the master carabiner will stay in the system and so walter siebert tested that for me and he got eight kilonewtons instead of the one or four kilonewtons without the sliding x so look at this [Music] so much better and then i want to present to you the clove hitch used in that way so you undo the carabiner you do a clove hitch in the sling and you clip it like this or you can look at brent peters video he does it faster than me um and so clipping like this ryan jenks got seven kilonewtons to make it slip when unclipped from one side here and walter sebert he got five 5.5 kilonewtons look [Music] [Music] [Music] but then what if you combine the sliding x with the clove hitch so you do your sliding x like this and you can do like brand peters so after the sliding x you grab like this and you twist it and clip again and that's it so and it's a little bit harder to tighten but that's it so you have a clove hitch with a sliding x and it's clipped into a master point so walter siebert tested this clove x and he got also eight kilonewtons so not bad better than the clove by itself [Music] [Music] [Music] hot walter also did some dynamic tests and those tests you will see uh the e drops uh incredible weight like 100 kilos and a factor 2 falls actually you see in that video that it's a chain that is the extension and there's only 10 centimeter of sling so the factor is more like 10. so it's so much energy that in every test the nut slides completely and the sling fails either it breaks or it releases completely but what i did is because he has so many readings of the force that this knot slips at i just checked the curve of the forces in time and so the girth itch slipped around two kilonewtons look at the test and the graph now the gert x that i think is an improvement uh it slipped around it went up to 10 kilonewtons but then it slipped and then it it went to more as low as two kilonewtons force but it stabilizes and slips at around 3 kilo newtons look at the test and the graph in this graph you can see the energy absorbed against time for the girth x and girth itch and the gyrtex is above so it's holding more than the girth so it got stuck at the sewing here but on a quite low load i can i can open this link quite easily that's not a big deal and is it undamaged you can you can feel the melting but here the damage is okay not a big damage and then if you're into the clove hitch like bran peters is look at the drop test and the graph and finally the cloth x with the test and the graph so to summarize the results i made that table for the slopal static tests uh we've done the girthage and it gave amongst two tests one was 1.2 kilonewton and the other one gave four kilonewtons then sloppol girth x we got 8 kilonewton to make it slide very good then the slow pole with the clove hitch was surprisingly high 5 kilo newton but with the clove x we got eight kilonewtons the star means that the there was damage to the sling it became really hot and you could see melting nylon and so that's not something you'd like to see but the the sling was still holding something it wasn't destroyed or cut then with the drop test or dynamic test the girthage slipped initially at three but then went down to around two kilonewtons and and as low as one kilo newton in some at some time then with the girth x initially to make it slide it took a whopping 11 kilonewtons and then it went around three kilonewtons with a minimum of one the clove hitch it took five kilonewtons to make it slide and then it settled around three and as low as one kilonewton made it slip the clove x initially it needed nine kilonewton to slip and then settled around six and as low as four the thing is that it it cut because it damaged the sling and you could argue that if it holds 9 kilonewtons it's good enough for a belay station because you don't want to be shock loading a delay station that high so in conclusion i think the girth x and the clove x knots that i showed you are improvements over the girth and the clove for that type of belay station please let me know what you think in the comment whoa whoa whoa what could happen with the beel dyneema slings of just six millimeter and the edelweiss dyneema slings of seven millimeter that has to be answered at some point until we got more tests be careful guys okay go on with the show please like this video if you liked it and subscribe to my channel and my specialty is rope soloing if you're interested in that go see my website blissclimbing.com and my online courses you'll find there thank you

Channel: Yann Camus BlissClimbing

Views: 12,718

Rating: 4.9433961 out of 5

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Id: UMuCkC3jshA

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021