Climbing PITONS for aid climbing big walls TESTED!

Do you want to watch us smash in some pitons? I've got some angles here, knife blades, and lost arrows. We're going to smash in and do some brake tests to see how strong they are on this episode of How Not to Big Wall. Hi, I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to How Not to Highline. Go to slackline.com if you want to learn how to highline or place bolts. We're going to brake test some pitons in real rock because I'm super curious how strong they are when you get a good smashing in. What I have here are some lost arrows, not lost arrow spires, and this is a sawed-off angle which is great for piton scars. Then full length. I might keep this because I use it. Then we also have some knife blades for the really thin cracks. Now I just bought this book from Past the Piton Pete. He didn't ask me to promote it, but it is a phenomenal book about big walling and so this whole section is about pitons and hooks and stuff and it's got so many stories, so many photos. It's a really well put together book. So I'm bumping it because I freaking love it. So let's start smashing. The idea is we don't want the rock to move in our brake test. We got a bunch of small rocks all around this middle of nowhere space that we're in. These are frowned upon to install on routes you don't need them on because they do scar the rock. The more you use them the rock over time opens up and then you need totems or aliens or whatever because the hole is not like an oval shaped hole. This was how they used to climb exclusively plus like nuts and passive pro back in the day. It was gnarly the amount of stuff they took up walls. Crazy. So we have a something-to-one pulley system depending on how we need to put it together in order to pull these out. We did some cam brake tests that we were able to do that were super awesome and very interesting. So make sure you check out those episodes. Anyways see if we can get this guy in there. Well there's contact at the beginning and the top there. That was really bad. There we go. Is that the ringing sound they talk about? I'm not going to clip to this little six mil cordelette. This is just a keeper sling. So we're going to stick a carabiner in there and see if the carabiner breaks first. In order to get these out you got to hit them this way and hit them this way and then shock load them and that's what the eye of this hammer is for. This is Yosemite hammer. So in case you didn't know that about big walling and if you do know a lot about big walling you can tell that I haven't done this very often. So let's just pull up. So what we have here is our dynamometer from slack snap in order to test this. This is a slow pull. This isn't a shock load but I do think that shock loads and slow pulls are the same. It's just how it affects the device. We are going to build a drop test tower and we're going to test all sorts of stuff. If you know how to do dynamometers at 2500 times per second this is only like 60 times per second and you know how to get lab jacks to talk to my laptop, contact me. So from the dynamometer we have an smc three inch set of pulleys here that goes to a tree and we are going to pull that in order to get up to 20 kilonewtons the way that we pull on them and we'll see if it comes out before that. Yes it caught it. All right what'd we get? Huh and that is straight out and sometimes you don't do that you know like you put it in an angle or something but six. You can see the contact points were right there. Pitons can be pulled straight out if you stick them in like a roof and you're loading them straight down. Sorry for shaking that wasn't very helpful for you as an audience. We're going to maybe test hopefully at an angle. Most of the time you're sticking them in this way and pulling them down but they're like in constrictions or whatnot. These are not used very often. If you're using this size you can probably fit a cam in there. So this is for really hard routes a3 plus. I did the zodiac in 2016 on El Capitan which is usually takes some pitons especially in the on the nipple pitch on the roof. I was able to do it clean with inverted cam hooks and that was scary and that's something I definitely want to test. We might test that today or we'll make hooks a whole separate video but we're definitely going to test hooks because I was really wondering how strong they were while I was on them. 6.4 kilonewtons can hold a fall because that's kind of what they are. Anyways this is actually a really really good placement for a cam but anyways the higher the pitch goes the better the placement. If I get to the end of the eye here without it having a super high pitch it's not going to be a bummer. You do want it to be in far enough otherwise you're leveraging the outside of it but we're pulling straight out so I don't think that'll affect it. So what's swinging Bobby? 7.65 so that was it definitely had better engagement. I got one more newton out of it. Huh seems to be in piton shape. All right let's stick in a lost arrow. So this is a lost arrow maybe why they call lost arrow spire lost arrow spire or the other way around who knows. Anyways let's see here it's a little dirty of a crack. It bottomed out. It'd be nice if I could pound it in just a hair more but obviously I can't so let's see what this does. While Bobby's resetting that this episode is sponsored by no one. No one sponsors these episodes. That way we can stay biased. But I did start a coffee business with my friend. It's instant coffee you just take the one of the packets inside and you pour it in hot water. That's how instant coffee works. That really helps if you buy some of that or donate to paypal or patreon in order to keep this channel breaking things. Now this episode isn't that expensive because I get to re-hang up my pitons since I don't really use them but we have been breaking a lot of cams and I just bought slackline.com which is pretty rad domain. 200% of your donations goes back into this channel. I am very interested in building a drop test tower and I'm going to continue to put it out in this in the universe that if someone can help us design a dynamometer that's a little bit more portable that would be great. It needs to be able to read 2,500 times per second and it needs to be connected to like a lab jack maybe a wireless thing and then go to my laptop. Anyways make sure you go to slackline.com we've got lots of good stuff on there. Gosh darn it. We put a newton on there usually before we start filming to save footage. Bobby got that to 1.3 and it came out um bummer. You can see the scratch marks on there so I'm gonna try placing this again. Whoa. Hey buddy. Yeah that felt a lot better when I was putting it in and it was um longer too. That's that. Let's go do some knife blades pulled straight out. This is a knife blade. Knife blades are thin. So I have one thin spot here that if I'm careful with I will be able to get the ping. Yeah it's not moving too much. All right let's try that one. I don't think it's going to take much to pull this out so I'm just going to film the whole process here. Not a lot holding that in there. We're at one or we're at 0.9. Oh man that's why we filmed that. 0.9. So I don't know if I can get a better placement because that's the only thin spot I had. I can try some other spots but these are too deep. There's too much here before that gets before I can put it in there. So this is kind of the crack we're working with. Just gonna see what we can do. Now we're gonna try to maybe use something over here and then pull at an angle and that might give us some different numbers. That'd be interesting if we could break one of the eyes off of the piton or a carabiner attached to it. So we have a thinner spot over here to put this in and it's nice when it goes in about 10 or 20 percent and then it gets tighter and then oh yeah that's awesome. We're going to be pulling kind of at an angle so I mean that's real life. The thing with knife blades is they kind of bend and stay bent so this one might be done when we're done with this test. Make sure you hit these in as hard as you can so the second guy can never pull them out. Yeah sucks for the second guy on this one. Okay we are all reset finally. We have our bomber knife blade if that's a thing. A bunch of soft shackles to keep the metal away from the line scale too. This is from linegrip.com and we broke one earlier today when we were filming an episode about cams and we were afraid to use this but I think our catching system with this catching the dyno and everything we feel safe about using it and it's less heavy which will be just better overall. We got our SMC pulleys and Bobby's ready to pull. Oh it's moving oh it's still holding oh god it's at 6.8 and it's moving yes yes What did we get Bobby? 6.84. These things are awesome they go up to 30 kilonewtons they break at like 90. We're going to do a break test on one probably the one that's already broken and yeah they're portable and nice for slacklining. They are only 60 times I think per second so they're not good for like shock load tests. It's really hard to get a good dyno for that but anyways back to pitons. You can see here that it's a little bit curvy and scratched but can be reused so that was pretty good for for such a thin blade. Let's try some different stuff at an angle now. What we're going to do is try to use I think either this crack up here and pull the direction we have been or we can we've been tinkering with ideas about using this thing and pulling in this direction. See what kind of uh numbers we can achieve. I would love to be able to like break one of the eyes if we were to get like a super bomb replacement but we'll see. So we're going to pull this sideways here. I believe this is going to be a good placement. Let's find out if we get the noise. It's a really good sound. I'm going to hit it in the direction we're going to be pulling it. Bummer. Awesome. So our crack seems to be cleaner. That is the Zipiton 3.82. This has been a great dyno for this since we're not smashing it on stuff. So let's stick in a what Lost Arrow. It's a pretty tight fit. Something super interesting if we zoom back and forth in the videos in order to like speed up to the good parts. I can notice this rock dropping after this gets pulled out. We're literally lifting the entire rock up with this wedge. That's an insane amount of mechanical advantage. The cams we did on a previous episode that we tested didn't do that. I didn't see the rock drop but the force that the lobes are putting on to separate the rocks not enough to lift this up. It was able to move a rock over there and that's why we had to move over to this crack. But the fact that these pitons are moving giant rocks is insane. Let's smash this in more. The idea is that you clean these out. They don't stay stuck. Otherwise they're called fixed pitons. Yeah that's that's probably stuck. Unless we can pull it out. Oh well shit. Well these ants are very upset. Anyways that did not take very much. What did it take? 2.32. Whoa man. Whoa. Well I don't know. Or else should I stick it. Bobby thinks he's got a better placement. So I don't think we're gonna have a good spot for Lost Arrow so we're gonna go do an angle and we're moving our whole system again. But I think right here it's it's a pretty good spot. Let's see here. Where was it? Oh yeah right there. Because it's gonna have a hard time being pulled into this constriction here and so we're gonna pull it that direction. It didn't have a good ping sound to it. I think this rock is kind of shitty. But when I hit it sideways it doesn't go really much at all and that's I'm trying to avoid it cockeying before we pull on it. So I don't know. Let's see what happens. Poof of dust. 3.23. Well we got better results pulling straight out instead of sideways. Put in the comments below why you think that is. It could be the rock is less quality over here. It could be because we're tweaking it out of alignment. I don't know but it's still pretty good. Three will get you like up. I don't know if it'll catch a whipper. Depends on your whipper. Also let me know what kind of episode you want to see or how you want to see them different. We're gonna maybe test tomorrow some cam hooks and some beaks and and the big the big hooks. Captain Hook. Anyways make sure you like, follow, and subscribe. Smash that like button. It really helps. And go to slackline.com because we've got a ton of great stuff on there and you can check out the chart with all of this data if you don't want to see it right here in the video and you can check out our other brake tests as well. Anyways make sure you like, follow, and subscribe. We'll see you next time. Cheers. I'm on one quarter inch bolt. Forgot the slackline but I've got giant pulleys. What's our uh force Bobby? I've never walked on pulleys before. Yeah we'll look later. Nah it's fine man. I got paracord holding me. Is peak hold on? Yep. All right, all right, all right. I'll get off. Bobby's a little worried that just paracord on soft shackles is holding me. I don't know what his deal is. 3.11. Not that fat. We're gonna pull the peat on.