Gym Climbing Forces - Climbing Science

When you whip climbing, how much force do you generate on yourself, the bolt, and the belayer? The Line Scale 3 was literally developed because of a test we did two years ago in a gym where we put a Line Scale 2 on the climber, the bolt, and the belayer. That ended up being a wildly popular video, but there was a common thread in the comments and that was the Line Scale 2 was not fast enough. You'd only read at 40 hertz or 40 times per second and then people wanted to see graphs and there was no load cell that would record internally and so I helped Andy Riedrich from Line Grip Incorporated who made the Line Scale 2 come up with the Line Scale 3. This is not a commercial, this is just me telling you why this exists. Something necessary when you're falling is to make sure you have a good harness which you can get for 20% off for 20 hours on ExtremeGear.org with a discount code and pinned as the top comment on our carabiner showdown video. A way to support this channel is to buy gear from ExtremeGear.org. Heart is Easy just came out with a video with them falling in a gym with Line Scale 3s all over the climber, the bolt, and the belayer. I'm not jealous because Ben has perfect hair, I'm jealous because Ben got to do this test with Mr. Line Scale 3 himself which Andy Riedrich explained really well how this works. There's two strips that measure the material deformation. When you pull this you can't see but the material stretches and these strips measure that and the electronics convert that through a voltage that changes through the stretch of the strips and so if you press you also deform the material just in a different way but the strips just register material deformation so you can go like this or you can go like this it's the same. So a few weeks ago I got to go to an outdoor climbing gym and do my own falls with three Line Scale 3s and Andrea weighs 130 pounds, sorry babe, and I weigh 160 pounds. 3, 2, 1. 1.08 yeah 1.92 okay 3.21 oh wow I hit 1.14. I got 2.64, 4.27. So in Ben's video you can see that he focuses on the force the climber sees for soft catches, big catches, or hard catches. Now I don't know if I'd want to sign up for hard catches on purpose but they were getting not that much of a difference considering it looked like their spine was going to fall out having a belayer pick their feet up right when needed them the most. The max force they could get on their climber was 2.92 and the max force I could get at the outdoor gym was 2.64 and then from our tests two years ago the max force on the climber was 2.43. So considering we have a lot of variables in all these tests we're all getting in that mid two kilonewton range. Now just if you didn't know a carabiner is rated for 20, 22, 24 kilonewtons and your rope is it'll break around 14 to 18 kilonewtons and it's basically super strong enough considering the forces you're putting on it. What's ironic is when I do giant rope swings I'm still I'm falling like quite a ways I'm still only getting three kilonewtons and even on our 200 meter Dan Osmond leaning tower project where we fell for seven seconds we were still only generating which isn't really that much more considering what it was. So it's nice to know that if the climber saw 1.41 kilonewtons or 2.93 kilonewtons as you see in Ben's video that it doesn't hurt too bad if it was a hard catch at least in that scenario. I've had hard catches before however I want to know how much force the gear is seeing. The quick draw because I know what that's rated for and I know what it really breaks at and I want to know how safety margin we have. Well I scoured all of Ben's data that he sent me and I graphed it out and I put it on the our website that will be in the link in the description below it's the only link that leads to it just to complement this video so you can see all the graphs the charts and the data and the pattern I saw is we were in the high threes low mid four kilonewton range on the gear and a bolt hanger would break around 20 30 40 or 50 depending on what it is the bolts that's in the infrastructure if you want to see how climbing gyms are made the bolts not just in the plywood the bolts in the infrastructure and that definitely is not going to break before the hanger and then the quick draw is going to break probably either at the dog bone or the carabiner right and that's going to be over in that 20 kilonewton range so you got a 5 to 1 safety ratio so far the rope is also pretty bomber because it'll break in that 14 to 18 kilonewton range but going up and down it's in a u-shape it actually breaks stronger at that point where the quick draw is what I found fascinating going through this data for hours was a plus b did not equal c the force on the blayer the force on the climber did not equal the force at the quick draw it was typically more because there's enough friction in the system the blayer is not going to see all the force I thought the climber and the blayer would be if they were equal weight see the same force but that's not the case the blayer would see in for instance one and the climber would see three and the quick draw would be at four now ben's team was trying to get more force on the climber which is a funny goal by zigzagging the quick draws they were clipping to to add friction so the blayer ended up seeing less than one kilonewton and the climber saw almost three but the quick draw saw 4.53 more than the two of them combined because of friction they zigzagged the clips of course there's friction yeah yeah yeah hold on but wait there's more when I fell I was clipped normal and it went more or less straight up there wasn't a lot of friction and Andrea's not heavy that sounds horrible I can't say that and I pulled Andrea up so it was what I would consider a soft catch however A plus B did not equal C there as well as you can see in the graph we had a discrepancy of 0.21 and 0.49 kilonewtons which is a lot of friction and on the other extreme example we were actually able to create a huge difference in our zigzag at pipeworks where the blayer only saw 0.36 kilonewtons and there was a 1.99 friction difference now another interesting thing to consider is if we were to take these three four five meter falls with 180 feet I'm mixing metrics if there is a three four or five meter fall with 50 meters in the system of rope that's going to be a really soft catch I don't think the climber would even get into the two kilonewton range whenever you catch somebody when they're kind of far away from you and they only fell three four five meters it's pretty soft I had one partner fall on a big wall once where he asked me if if I was okay and how that was for me and all this stuff and I was like what are you talking about I'm like falling asleep on sitting on my haul bag at the anchor good blayer I know and basically he whipped I had no idea because he zigzagged around this thing and was around the corner there was literally no yank on my harness so there's a lot of dynamics going on in a climbing fall and where the force ends up being dispersed so we have the three graphs for all 13 falls on the website plus the spreadsheets you can go nerd out but keep in mind there is hate to say it nothing perfect about anything the line scale three is going to read up to 30 kilonewtons basically before the screen breaks and the aluminum body is not going to break till 90 or 100 kilonewtons but if you're going to measure something in the one kilonewton range there is going to be a little margin of error for example if you have 0.1 kilonewton discrepancy on a 25 kilonewton test that's not a huge percentage difference and doesn't obscure the results at all but if you're testing things in the 0.75 or 1.2 range and you're trying to compare apples with apples then well if it's 0.1 off in that instance then it's off but that's not the point we don't need this to be super super sterile clean science because we're trying to get a range and a feel and a vibe of what's going on in the dynamics of this thing that a lot of people are scared of and we're trying to break gear fear here you might be able to notice some of the discrepancy when you compare the a plus b section of the spreadsheet where the friction is actually negative i don't think that's how it worked in real life i contribute that to the little tiny margins of error that you're going to get with a load cell of any type including the good ones that i have in my slack stat machine i'm gonna get less comments doing troll patrol what will they have to say speaking of backyard science i love backyard science backyard science doesn't mean we can't put out really nice graphs and really analyze what we saw and compare it just means there is a lot of variables there's variables in the weight of the climbers and belayers if they jump backwards or if they jump straight down if they caught there's a lot of ways to catch things and so it's pretty hard to standardize or sterilize a test like that so the uiaa does these fall tests to compare apples for apples one rope to another to find out how strong it is so ironically when they slow pull it they put it in the best case scenario which is a big diverter and pull nice and slowly but when they drop test it they put in the worst case scenario it's nice to know both ends of the spectrum but to get that uiaa seven falls rating on their gear they're taking an 80 kilogram weight and they're doing a 1.8 factor fall so that means there's a lot more falling than there is rope and they do that over and over and about seven times it breaks now that's not exactly realistic however imagine if they were just taking a 50 kilogram thing doing a factor one fall imagine your label saying uiaa 97 falls i don't see that being a realistic way to test one rope to another having to drop something a hundred or five hundred times before it even breaks so uh what they do is great for what they do but it's super awesome to know that you can fall more than seven times on a rope in real life and not have to replace it what i'm really excited about is the video ben's coming out with where he actually goes to mamut's lab and they actually explain how the uiaa falls happen how they're rated how they measure it and i'm super super jealous so uh black diamond or sterling if you want to invite me i'm uh down to come now since 150 of these bad boys are floating around the world i want to show people how not to use these you'll see in the videos that we're doing that we have a soft shackle going from our two points of our harness to the line scale i never just have that as a connection you'll see in ben's video in my videos that will tie into this and then have the tail the long tail of the figure eight go directly into our harness as well or you can use two soft shackles and tape them closed and double wrap them is a nice trick so it stays as close as it can to the harness instead of floating up here and with the risk of it hitting you so you don't want it up here even the dano jump we double wrapped it to get it here so if it ever if you ever leaned forward into it it's it's hitting this and not that's the audio it hits your chest and not your face that would be a fail video for josh and another thing for setting your triggers is make sure it's more than 0.5 that was a lot of data to go through because it kept triggering after the fall because the climber weighed more than 0.5 a nice trigger when i'm doing these tests if you ever end up doing these tests with your friends that have line scale threes three to even five seconds of data because it'd be nice to see what that sine curve levels out at but you only need one second of pre-capture time because there's really nothing going on more than a second before the fall is going to spike up and then you're going to get these sine curves so about five seconds afterwards and you want it at 1280 hertz if you're only going to do a few seconds anyways and you don't want to set this at 0.5 if any person's going to be sitting on it because they're probably about 0.5 now one kilonewton is 224 pounds and no one's really going to ideally weigh that so if you set it there they will generate more force than that when they fall so you don't miss a trigger and then the quick draw if you're hanging on it and your blare's hanging on it sometimes it's nice to have it at maybe 1.5 kind of hard to have it at the sweet spot science is not as easy as it looks even backyard science and make sure you don't subscribe to ben without subscribing to my channel first otherwise he's going to get too big and too famous to talk to me anymore and make sure you go get a harness while we're doing this flash sale go to extremegear.org 20% off for 20 hours with the discount code hidden in our last carabiner showdown video that we published and hit this before you head over to the next video