Break testing OLD Climbing gear on Slacksnap - Slings, dog bones, and ropes

Would you like to see a 30 year old quick draw dog bone break? Including some other slings that are 30, 20 and 10 years old? Check it out on this episode of how not to slack snap. Ah! So what we got here is a sling that was purchased in 1989 to 1991, so it's about 30 years old. Including this one here. And this is all from Lane Zuelke. I hope I said that right. And he's based out of Louisiana. And this sling, I believe, is also in our 30 year old pile. This was in 2003, so it's almost dateable. And this is 2010, definitely not dateable. So, and this also is, I believe, the 30 year old rope. So very eligible to slack snap. And yeah, we already have 2.4 kilonewtons on our slack snap machine. Now the reason I have a rug on here is because I don't want, things go flying when you slack snap. So we put that on there to protect it. We are using carabiners here instead of soft shackles, which is what this is. Because I like when this stuff goes flying. It's nice and soft. But what we do, if you haven't been to slack snap in a while, since we've been bolt busting our guts out, is we basically have a 20 to one pulley multiplier here. And it's just a lot of six millimeter Amseal going back and forth, which is my original backup to my spider silk highlines. And it goes over to this fixed side with the pulleys. And our Costco wench. It's being double spooled, so I get a 10 to one speed. It's pretty nifty. And this is my garage. This is where all the magic happens. Other than the gear room that you see all the time. So I just cleaned up from GGBY. And we just went through all of our bolts and stuff. And we have all these left over. And you probably have seen our bolt busters episodes. Check those out if you haven't. They're quite interesting. Slack snap is a lot of fun. We are at sample number 730. And we're going to see what this breaks at. Now, what does a new one break at, you ask? I have no idea. I just think- 22 kilonewtons. I guess I could look at the MBS on here. It does say, warning, proper use requires expert instructions. Well, luckily you're here at How Not To Highline, as we will give you expert instructions on what happens when you pull it too hard. All right, so it broke where? It connected with the carabiner on the tight side. It didn't actually break any of the stitching. Usually on a lot of our slackline webbing tests, we get the first bar tack is usually what's breaking. The grand reveal is 23.65 kilonewtons. After 30 years with a nylon sling, you still get full strength. And then we also have pounds of force. This was our first scale. And it's also nice to have a redundant system. 5,600 pounds of force. Sample 731 is a Mammut sling. And this is also about 30 years old. This was like that. And so it broke at the first bar tack and not at the carabiner like the previous one. Our carabiners are still working. 22.90 is pretty good considering how old that is. 5,350 pounds of force. This foam did absolutely nothing. Let's show you the process of resetting this. So you can kind of see how the machine works. I take the tails coming out of the winch and I reset it because I want to start with as little as possible in that winch, only about three or four wraps on either side. That way it doesn't bunch up. Now I have got a lot of resistance when I pull this. And I reset that. Now I unclip my figure eight. And yes, I use a figure eight in this system. So I can pull this closer, reattach a sample. And then I just clip that figure eight back into place. And I'm doing the same sample sizes every time. It makes it a lot easier. So I've already recorded all this. I take the sample off. I take the number and come check out our box. This is our scrap box. It's pretty neat. As much as I want to go in order of age, I'm going to go in order of like size items. So I'm going to do another dog bone. Flip this around. We install our samples. A lot of samples that we do actually take kind of some creativity to get them in here because we want what we attach to them not to break. And that's why we use soft shackles for a lot of things. Okay, so we tried quick links and a bunch of shit. I have these other steel carabiners that are 45 kilonewtons. I just can't put a normal carabiner in here because carabiners break at 18 to 22 kilonewtons. So anyways, that's in there. I'm going to just switch this side out. Like every sample takes some finessing, right? So that's set up again. And it's very important that we have this orange rope here. Otherwise shit would go lying. Anyways, set that off to the side. Very important to hit zero on the dynos and to protect them. And also before we attach this, we're at 732. That's a lot of slack snapping. So every sample is labeled. I'm going to write down what this is before I break it. And I'll wear those earplugs and follow me over here. Just take that figure eight. This is just because it gives me options. This amount of AMC will allow me to basically touch those shackles together. The end of this winch does not actually see that much force. It loses so much in just friction that it's just not a big deal. And before we start filming anything, I always make sure we take it to about two kilonewtons to save data and just recording time. And so we're at 2.7 kilonewtons. I guess I could lock that if we want. And we film in slow motion as much as we can. So this is my Galaxy S9 and it captures quite a bit. It's not very detailed, like 480p, but it is 960 frames per second, which is 32 times slower than real life. So it looks actually pretty cool. So just put that there, put this here and let's film it. Awesome. So I watched this carabiner and the rope caught it before it smashed into anything. We'll review our sample. It broke where the carabiner was and not at the first stitch. Probably because it's so smashed in there. Isn't that interesting? 23.50. And this, this was what, 2003? Yeah. Yep, this is a 2003 dog bone at 5,500 pounds of force. Oh, no, it broke on the other side. That's gonna be so hard to undo that. But it broke where the carabiner was. Interesting. On this side. Whoa, whoa, 25.3. And I think what's the MBS on these? 22. 20, 22. Soft goods rarely are the MBS. And these are old as hell. 5,900 pounds of force. So this rope is from 1991. It was used for one season. I tied my figure eights as good as I could. We've already got 1.6 kilonewtons on our rope here. And since this is the tail that is not tensioned, it's already starting to deform the knot. People talk about dressing your knots, but what they don't really mention is that once certain tensions are achieved, it actually undresses your knots. We're gonna focus on this test is how much this rope stretches. I have to make sure that this catcher is super long because this rope's going to stretch probably double is what I have experienced in the past. So we're gonna do this one a little bit more zoomed out. We're going to watch how much that stretches. This is already at 1.6. This was tied as tightly to this one as I could. There was only about this much space when I had it tied. So now it's already gone to there. So let's let it rip. And I was curious if this was dynamic or not. Whoa, only 14.15. That's half as strong as the quick draws. That's crazy. Whoa, feel how warm this is. Wow, that's hot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow. This knot is all sorts of jacked up. Now, of course, this was wrapped around this way and it broke inside the knot. This side is the side that didn't break. You can see this is what came out of the knot there. And that side, but this side you can see kind of how deformed this figure eight looks. Pretty hard to keep those things dressed nicely if you're gonna put this much force on it. But I mean, that thing stretched more than double probably, right? And look how much. We double spooled this thing. It went to the center and started to work its way and started to work its way back over here. This is an REI double length sling with no MBS from 1989 to 1991. We're gonna do this a wide angle because it's going to probably stretch a bit. And what happened? Oh, holy shit. Stretchy long samples. Okay, so that happened. I guess where the carabiner was, I assume, yeah. It's all a little wrinkly now. I bet you it's not rated for 26, but we got 26.65. And 6,200. Damn, dude. And here's our final test. This is a rope that Bobby had that is about 20 years old and was used for three years as a dog run rope. So it left outside continuously for three years. And we're gonna find out how strong this is right now. Sick. Oh, you can see here that it broke in this knot. This had a parallel line. It was probably going through there. Oh, that is super stiff. Whoa, only 11.9. Pretty stiff. Pretty warm. Kind of smelly. You can see kind of how the knot gets all jacked. But yeah, it's, I guess I would whip on it. Would you whip on your rope? I would whip on that. So those were interesting tests. Thank you, Lane, for donating those products to us. It's pretty hard to get 30-year-old things to test. And they were in actually really great condition. So not every 30-year-old climbing product is going to result in higher than the MBS. Actually, it loses quite a bit of strength when things are left in the sun, especially nylon. And so we could see in Bobby's rope that it was, 11 kilonewtons is kind of low. But it's higher than we were expecting. But we also have to take into consideration that every old product is gonna have a different number. So please don't just use crap and think that you're gonna be fine. It is better, I mean, is your life after all. So please use good gear. This is just for entertainment purposes only. But we also learned a lot about climbing gear, how it breaks and when it breaks. This channel does focus more about highlining and we do a lot more MythBusters stuff and break tests and things like that on this channel. If you actually want to learn how to rig a highline, we are making Highline University focused more on that. And so we can keep this channel pretty interesting instead of covering basics all the time. So if you actually wanna learn A to Z, the Highline University at hownottohighline.com is going to be your best bet. Make sure you like, follow and subscribe to our Facebook, YouTube and Instagram because we're posting stuff all the time on all three platforms. Cheers. Hey, thanks for watching, but don't be an idiot and try highlining without going with somebody who knows what they're doing the first time you go out. We actually have available now the Highline University International, which is A to Z everything you need to know before you go highlining. This teaches you how to use a highline that's already rigged. So let's talk about some leash management. That's the H0 course, which is out right now and available at hownottohighline.com. It's over a hundred videos with quizzes, PDFs, illustrations and it comes with homework and teachers that you submit it to. It's a very interactive online school. So you get to learn in person online.