Black diamond carabiner break tests in slow motion

How strong are new carabiners compared to the exact same ones that are 15 years old? Watch us break test these on our slack set machine here at How Not to Highline. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to my gear room. This channel is mostly about highlines and highline rigging and we don't often use aluminum carabiners in our highline rigs because of the cyclic loading and you never want to use a carabiner on a master point at least at the bare minimum for your highline rigs. However, I used to climb and I have quite a few of them and I haven't purchased any in quite a while and I'm curious how strong these scratched up carabiners are. So I purchased four of the identical carabiners that I currently have. These are black diamond oval wire gates and these lockers are the rock lock screw gate, both from black diamond. What we're going to do is pull test these on my slack snap machine. This slack snap machine has a 20 to 1 pulley system that I pull together from Tractor Supply and a winch that I got from Costco and a giant aluminum rectangle. So let's find out if there's any difference with these carabiners. So here's our first test. We have an oval wire gate black diamond super old carabiner and I use soft shackles. We have videos on how to make these in order to break this and this or just orientates it so the carabiner sits flat. We have two dynamometers to record our forces in one in pounds of force and one in kilonewtons just so we have both and let's find out how strong this is. Wow I'm glad that I put this on a tripod when I break metal. That shit went flying. You can see how the nose there broke off and the inside of the carabiner. So this carabiner broke at 20.98 kilonewtons which is almost the 23 kilonewtons it says that the breaking strength is but it is pretty old and then we broke another one and we got 20.94 kilonewtons and you can see here how the aluminum is very dull on the inside and that it's very porous when you're looking at it on the inside. These carabiners are breaking the notches once those are broken it stretches so rapidly that the spine breaks and we had the same results on the new ones we got 20.88 and 22 kilonewtons on the new oval wire gate carabiners which is basically the same as the other ones. We did get a full 22 which is one more kilonewton than the others but we did not get 23 kilonewtons in any of these scenarios. Now I'm using eight millimeter soft shackles instead of like a single rope so that could be putting more pressure on not just the spine but the wire gate itself and that could be pulling both instead of just having the force mostly on the spine which is where the strength is. So the next we did our locking carabiners and our locking carabiners have an MBS a Our first sample we got was 24.2 kilonewtons. What happens with these bigger locking carabiners is the pair shape bends inward and then the gate comes off the notch which breaks like the ovals where the spine ends up snapping immediately on our first sample and it's breaking just a corner of these notches because of the way it's shaped when it finally reaches maximum breaking you know maximum strength Our second one did the same thing as the first one we got 23.98 kilonewtons but this one stretched before the spine broke as I continued to winch it since it didn't snap immediately and then we put our new rock lock carabiner on there and we got 18.48 kilonewtons which is quite a bit lower than than the ones we're getting and the gate broke at the notch like the other ones but then we put another new locking carabiner on there and we got 24.6 which is our highest so far what was interesting is the gate broke at the base where the pin is and then it also stretched before snapping so basically new and old broke the same and pretty close to the MBS except for that random 18 kilonewton one. Now I don't uh generally like the large locking rock lock carabiners unless it's for a personal anchor because it gives you a lot more options on what you can clip when I'm building a highline anchor but as far as climbing goes I like having more space in a climbing hanger especially if I'm doing big walls so I like the camp photon screw gate carabiner because it's a very very small nose you can get two or three carabiners into a single hanger whereas these you can barely get two you know depending on what it is so it all depends on what you're trying to use on what carabiner is the best the reason I didn't break these is because uh well I like mine and I don't have that many of them so black diamond does not sponsor this episode I literally just bought a few brand new carabiners and broke a bunch of shit uh that's what we do here at slack snaps and how not to highline I appreciate my patrons who help get involved all of our slack snap data is available to our patrons and the video is correlated with it so if you're into break tests and rigging and all the stuff that we're doing here on this channel please get involved with either one dollar per episode or sponsor us with a one-time donation on paypal if you want to see more things like this break and you want to sponsor a video uh and you're willing to buy a handful of things for us to break that are new um let me know and I'll let you know how you can get involved one last word of caution is you can't use aluminum carabiners on a highline rig especially not to connect your leash because they can come off it almost happened to me when I saw this uh when I looked up after a whip so use rings master points even though these are above 20 kilonewtons uh and your highlines are only six kilonewtons they sound safe enough but cyclic loading can especially if you have high winds and it's force force force force force force rapidly it can break the aluminum whereas steel takes that like a champ because it bends more and it's not good practice to use aluminum carabiners on the bolts themselves we have quick links I can use six seven or eight millimeter quick links for my hangers or I just hopefully there's glue ends you can just thread your static rope directly into them so I know this is a channel that's why I like to make sure you know that these are really only for your personal anchor when you're highlining as big and beefy as these things look they can break therefore you shouldn't highlight or climb hey thanks for watching but don't be an idiot and try climbing or highlining for the first time you go out without someone who knows what they're doing there are too many slack liners and climbers these days to try to learn this stuff on your own if you're new to highlining and you want to get into the crowd of things we have 1300 facebook groups on slackademics.com for you to find a slackline group near you we also have a ton of slack festivals and once you meet a few people you'll get to find out what slack festivals are coming near you you can also message me for private lessons if you're interested in learning how to highlight you want to help support this channel we got the patron or paypal thing you get the slack snap data if you do that or you can buy a t-shirt on the link in the description below and get some cool hats if you like super good enough which is what we stand for in this channel to not overkill things but make sure that they're good enough and i also put links in the description below on the carabiners we broke in this video if you click those links to buy any of these it also helps this channel so until you have a chance to buy some perfectly good carabiners and break them on a 222 kilonewton brake test machine in your garage make sure you check out our other videos and be sure to like follow and subscribe hit that bell button so you don't miss any of our future episodes cheers