It's NOT what you think

Oh my god. This little guy is called a t-block. This is a tiny ascender that you put on a rope and a carabiner pushes the rope up against the teeth and it holds you. Now we did a thorough video on micro attractions which have teeth as well. Oh that desheathed it! And even compared it to an ascender but some of the questions in there was what about the t-block? Does the aggressive teeth inside of this thing shred a rope quicker than if you were to use one of those devices? What's great is this is the rope that we used in the micro traction video so we can just add to what we've already done and build upon it. But what I'm most excited about in testing in this video is doing what they tell you you're not supposed to do with it which we'll get into in a little bit. Let's start by slow pulling this on the dynamic rope. Oh that's actually a little higher than we got before. Now it's not science unless you do a large sample size of two so we're going to do this again. You can see that the way Petzl does approve in this case if you're just using it as an ascender is you can just clip these two side plates without being inside of the rope. So if these side plates were to break you're no longer connected but it desheaths the rope first as we just demonstrated. The other way to do it is if you do this to where the rope is actually inside of the carabiner which matters for later. We got six scale engines again. So clip like this or just clipped like this on this side is uh giving us the same results. Now these are technically an old style. The new style has an orange spring loaded device on the top that pushes your rope into the teeth so now you can use an I-beam or round stock carabiner which is nice to be a little bit safer. It doesn't slide down the rope but I want those ones which is why I was willing to destroy my old ones here. You can compare the teeth between this ascender and the tip block and the surface area between the two is technically the same except I think the carabiner is only pushing the rope into part of it but you can see in the micro traction blog that we were getting more like five and a half kilonewtons and so let's just see if we're gonna get that today with this ascender and rope again. And 6.6 today. So that wasn't the rope we were testing it's this blue greener one and so I have just enough in order to test tip block versus ascender to see if we're getting super similar enough results. Oh interesting that rope's breaking lower there's just some variation in it that one got 6.6 that one is a little bit lower let's just try it with a micro traction and see what's going to one's even lower. So I pulled on the Biel's Millennium 10.0 static rope with the ascender that we did last time and we were able to get a higher number than we did before and so I'm just checking to see if something's wrong and according to this line scale and my load cell they're within 0.1 which is super accurate enough so I'm just going to conclude that there's variations you can get when putting teeth on rope just like when you put knots in rope. Now let's pull a tip block on this 10.0 static rope and see what happens. Oh geez that's a lot that's better than the ascender got let's do it one more time for science there you go large sample size. Okay so the teeth shred the rope between five and seven kilonewtons whatever that's not the rabbit hole I came here for you might be asking what happens if you tested it with unicorn rope well that's literally the next episode I'm going to film oh god oh that's terrifying so if you want to see that you can either subscribe or sign up for our new newsletter where you can actually go see a film I have not put on YouTube before of our mile-long zipline and you can download the bolting bible pdf and you are entered to win some of our giveaways for those who open the emails let's go find out what I really wanted to know with the drop tower okay so this if you were simul climbing your partner is down there and the dummy is you and you're climbing up so at the second falls they're not going to pull you off but you notice how I clipped it this is inefficient at best and maybe dangerous at worse because the only thing catching you now are these two plates so let's see what's worse this desheaths the ropes before these two plates break or if the rope is always the weakest link the leader is going to fall in a simul climb oh shit so I didn't attach it to anything because usually when I test teeth it's the teeth catching but that's not what happens when the leader falls simul climbing it's the second person is the I had no second person connected down there so we tried it again after I connected it to the tree at the bottom so one oh my god this is not even the teeth side this was just the fact it went over that edge you know that's kind of high for a whipper and that counts the sheath slipping which is quite a bit now those two tabs did hold which is the part I was mostly interested in we just got a more interesting result out of it but you definitely would have other problems besides that if you were to fall like this could you imagine being halfway up a climb and you and your partner are only being held by the two plates on the side and it's not in the carabiner uh it shreds the rope first which I'd hate to say is good news but this doesn't break I guess the shredded rope would give you more anxiety at that point but now I wanted to test what would happen if you I don't know did it the right way to where if the leader fell the rope is in the carabiner one oh it worked like it's supposed to imagine that well it does make me feel better that if you do it right it works even though the force is irrelevant in this situation there's your number so what would happen if the second fell or the person at the bottom well it's the same idea as to where you are blaming them on teeth but they're falling not at all if you're proper belaying now if you are the follower and you've just climbed up and you have a bunch of slack and then you fall on teeth whether it's this style of blaming or simul climbing with a tib lock I guess you could sign your climb with that as well that's not good you really have to be mindful of the fact you have teeth between you and your leader be careful out there if it's simul climbing there's a place for it just be careful now in my experience I get a very similar result doing a slow pull test versus a drop test so pretend the leader is climbing up and then the leader falls and you have the weight of that person the weight of this person and the force generated the question is how much force does it take to break this or is this going to break every time well hot damn that's better than I thought it would be I mean this is a bigger problem I guess I was worried about the wrong thing it would take quite a bit to generate that much force but hmm okay let's try it the way you're supposed to you're climbing leader falls actually that's not what you're supposed to you're not supposed to fall when you're simul climbing goes like that and we're going to pull like that to just give you a comparison of what it's like when it's being pulled through a carabiner pretty much the tip block is going to do nothing at this point if I pulled on this rope with a figure eight figure eight 18 kilonewtons if you put it in a u-shape you're not going to get double but you're going to get more so I'm going to demonstrate that real quick it broke in the knot figure eight there see how the rope broke on one side and when this recoiled there's so much tension left on this because the teeth won't let it go back I kind of shredded that that is 20 kilonewtons more just by clipping it right so the carabiner you clip this stuff to is rated for 20 something kilonewtons and when you have it in a u-shape you're going to get 20 something kilonewtons which is nice you want the strength you want some safety ratio even though you're not going to get to 20 you want some wiggle room now this is a static rope because I it strong enough to test the plates that didn't break but the concept's the same in a dynamic rope I usually 9.8 millimeter get 14 kilonewtons with a figure eight to a figure eight and in a u-shape I'll get 20 something low 20s if I can't break it like this I'm not really quite sure how to break it I suppose we could do this I've had this thing for so many years the sentimental value let's do it that's why I don't stand next to that okay that is very impressive wow that is just amazing how strong that was that's makes me feel better even though this seems to be super strong enough the way it interacts with your rope is horrible as it was desheathing it when otherwise it would have held you normal now Simon climbing by itself is already dangerous just uh yeah try to make it less dangerous I'm gonna include Alpine Savvy's blog in the description below because he did an awesome write-up on all this and if you guys have follow-up questions I will be able to answer that by just making a 60 second short breaking one or two things and incorporating into this video which you will know that if you sign up for the newsletter that I posted that and if you can get your gear at extremegear.org that does really help us 10% supports what we're doing now I highly recommend the micro attraction video it's way more in depth than what I even did here so make sure you go check that out next