This is my most requested video...EVER

cams are a pretty cool piece of climbing gear and it's pretty crazy how many different variations and kinds there are check out the super cam for example some are big some are tiny some have different Siz loes we have over 20 variations just on our shelves and we have 20% off almost all of them for no nut November get it now let me tell you about one of the weirdest cams we've got this is the Angel Cam and it comes with some instructions your cam is a little complicated if uh if it requires a poster to explain how to use it or you can just watch this video where we used it we broke test it and we'll be dissecting it I know seriously yeah it's weird so in case you don't know this is a normal Cam and you squeeze it and you put it in a crack and a rock and then you clip your rope to it and that's supposed to hold you if you were to fall I explain things like that because the algorithm will do weird things and show this to a lot more people than maybe climbers anyways the angel cam has the same loes except they're attached to these wings that will expand it you know what's crazy is this is my most requested video ever holy moly there are so many skulls on this instruction pamphlet I'll make sure we have this on our shop page where you can get it at our store now since I'm not sure how popular these are going to be since they are more of a novelty piece of climbing gear I'm not sure how many to stock so I'm not going to have too many if you are interested in them go to the store and get them while you can shall we test this in some real Rock I love doing that here's a shallow wide placement and number four doesn't quite fit there without putting it in like that and then as soon as you pull down on it that might not hold but because those loes are smaller it might do okay in there or not since the loes are smaller it does seem like an okay placement but let's find out after we test this placement that's in that weird crack with our setup here going to a tree backed up to our bolt let's just start with this hey we didn't damage this we're getting better at it 6.58 so it still works it just came out oh wow look at the teeth on this that might have held a whipper oh that was violin ooh can you smell I can smell it 10.98 and I I think it still works wow I'm impressed just for reference it's a very wet Rock for testing this in you can see right here where one of the loes were and if you ever use a line scale for this use something above it to pull this up so when it breaks it doesn't smash against stuff that loobe got chewed up pretty good so that's the next placement and that's in there woo what are the damages a uh-oh uh-oh why am I holding the tripod sideways I'm not sure did you crack something oh the bolt came out your bolts are not supposed to do that holy 11 eight well how's the cam so that piece of plastic right there that is a guide for the wire broke off uh and it hold on does it not deay anymore no but why that's the only Lo that's moving right now oh that wire is supposed to go right alongside that edge there's a groove right there huh who knew more complexity could have more things potentially go wrong with it ah fixed it uh how's the bolt hole looking empty there's no way that could have pulled that out the Rope is supposed to break before that comes out shall we test it full spread now there's a number four and there's the full spread it didn't feel like a great placement cuz when I put it in the loes were good on this side but it was kind of flaring on that side 2.27 so that's a decent placement but I'm going to pull it this way I guess 20 not bad the Rope broke where the soft shakle was on it there is a lot to unpack in that brake test segment first of all no cracks were harmed in the making of this video cuz it's a crap pile of rock close to the road across the street from a Rockyard so if you're worried about the rock don't be and that bolt shouldn't come out like the force to catch a line scale is not the 11 or 17 Ken that I had on the cam is just catching a little bit you you could see at the end my 75 was able to catch the last break test and that was 17K in I'm just glad nobody whipped on that bolt and it came out anyways as we saw things will break on this if you well put a winch and a 5 to one on it so other than this wire not having the guide anymore I have I have never had a cam have any functionality after taking it up to 17K in so I'm pretty impressed on the strength I am 15 M over my last piece let's see if this Angel cam worked that seems like a pretty weird crack uh yeah yeah that looks like a might hold that is a much better placement as you can see right there I didn't mind having it it's a little bit heavy to hike in pretty far uh if it's easy ter Rin I could find something that a cam I have with me will fit in but my buddy took it to a crack and he put it in and some placements it was pretty nice to have in and other placements it would just fall out on him now if you are in into novelty stuff and you buy this then play with it play with it a lot with one hand figure out how to get it to do what you want place it in cracks before your life depends on it because it'll work I mean clearly it works but you have to be able to identify what is a good placement and what is not because it is different enough that your previous cam knowledge might not be super good enough let's do a top down View and get into the Weeds on how this thing works so from here down is all plastic so you don't clip to this and that is a really clever way of making sure people don't so after you place the cam in the crack and you get it where you want it you would pull this out and you would clip to this which is going through the head of the actual core of the cam spoiler alert on later's breake tests so it looks to be around 5.5 mm and it has teora in the middle at least that's what it looks like because the way it tears when it breaks tied in a Double Fisherman and the nylon will melt and they melted it over the end of the technora but the technora itself does not melt so the loop of cord freely rotates inside of there you just want to make sure that this or the tail doesn't get in the way of this clip that keeps it attached so when you do have it clipped to your harness it's not flopping around like this so if you flip this orange lever then it opens the gears here and that is what you allows you to put it back and I just usually push it up against something and then I clip it back with my middle finger and that is how I use this with one hand hand otherwise every time you see people using this on Instagram or whatever they go like this and they're taking two hands and they're playing with it and they're holding it and they're clipping it it's really important that you practice this with one hand if you're going to be using this while you're on lead now if you flip this lever back it closes those gears right there and the force of this wire coming down is trying to pull it outward and as soon as it disengages from those gears it opens all the way up until it meets the width of the crack you're in if you open this back up it spreads it apart you push it up against something you close it and you're back at the beginning now you can just manually make this happen you can just lift this up there's nothing stopping it from going that way but when you have it in a crack and is pushing back the gears are all working together it's not going to get pushed back unless it opens up and has that space but that's not going to happen in a crack but this trigger is pulling this that way and the orange ones going through this groove right here that you can see and it's pulling it that way and it doesn't take that much to dis engage or open it in the way that goes till it fits in the crack that you want so an offset or a hybrid is where the these two loes are bigger than these two loes which is great when you're in a crack that's not even and so the back of the crack is more narrow than the outside of the crack and so this ends up fitting really really well in those types of either pen scars are just depending on the shapee of the rock is the problem with these is they don't go up very big as far as I'm aware I don't believe there's any large cams that are offset and so to have something that does fit in an offset is where one of the places these shine now this is a 75 C4 from Black Diamond and that goes in that crack really well now when compared to the angel cam in theory it is the same size but I found after using it it wants to open up on you and then you got to open this up push it against something close it but you're trying to barely squeeze it in order to get it in there and then maybe I didn't close it all the way just squeeze enough to get it in there and it'll go and this is actually bomber even if you pull to the side as you'll see later on a brick test because it's pulling from up here and not down here at this rigid plastic part however I'm finding it very difficult to pull out of real Rock even though it works quite well in this demonstration so it seems pretty hard to get out when it's in the tight spots it's also pretty hard to get in I got it now when on traditional cam the trigger wires are pulling the loes down but what makes the cam want to go back up are these Springs here the springs on the angel cam look like this which I've never actually seen on a cam before but they do have the space here to work with so I think that's maybe why they do that now you can see that that trigger wire is a little bent up which is pretty normal but this trigger wire also kind of being exposed outto the outside has a little frame going on just after one use this was not because of a brake test we did now when you place this and you like where it is and you're like that'll hold me you really need to know which direction you're going because if it's going this direction you have to make sure it's on this side of this stem but if you have it on this side that's fine too and it'll go over the other side but not not on its own and if it gets stuck on something or gets stuck in here or goes on the other side that might damage it now this is a pretty good demo the 7 five obviously fits in there really well but the four doesn't because the total width of this from the loes is about 67 mm and this is just under 55 so therefore it fits in shallower wide cracks as you'll see in our brake test later now this 2013 C4 is 285 G and this thing is 282 G and the 75 is only 108 I always joke this was a three for one deal you get about three optimal sizes out of something that costs three times as much and weighs three times as much but I was comparing it to a 75 when I was joking about that it actually does weigh close to what the number four is and you do get a little bit more than three sizes out of it if you're willing to fight it back out of the crack now these do not get stuck quite like a link cam did now walking is when you go up and down up and down this is not what you want to do with this cam because there's so much motion and movement here independently on those arms that you would probably lose a solid placement and I mean we did have a few cams just fall out of the crack um but if you get a good placement with this it will do things other cams won't do you need an entire rack of these hell no you do not I could see somebody having one of these on their racks and what's kind of nice is two places I personally think they'd be useful one you don't know what you need at the anchor and so you kind of want to use what you got if you have something on your harness use it first that you know goes in there don't grab the uh Swiss army knife of cams another place these actually would be nice that I haven't seen anybody bring up yet is when you're doing C1 awkward Aid climbs on El keetan where it's kind of just one big flare and you're like trying to wedge your body in it and put a cam in and the offset thing that I told you earlier like offset cams don't come in this size so if you can have this flared out quite a bit and this one only flared out a little you can just keep bumping and shoving that cam all the way up that that awkward Aid climb what theu is going on here no but like for real what do you think of the Angel cam high quality piece of gear you only need one for an entire R everybody should buy them trying to get a free one buy them off of his website you will hate this cam for the first couple hours you're using it but after you get used to squeezing it pushing that orange lever done pushing it against something and clicking it back if you don't practice that and you start doing this on lead you're going to die let's go Yank on this in our slow pull machine and see what kind of shenanigans we can do so the first test I'll do in here is just pretty much what we were doing outside we're just going to pull straight on these two Granite plates inside of this [Music] form wow I broke it in the lab but not outside well there is a lobe so that pen is supposed to be in there I think and this was around that part but it bent this leg is fine but the lobe seems to be stuck there we go that wire was stuck under there so now it's uh 75% is safe was only 9k in so I just clipped these two sides so it ends up sitting cockeyed so the Cam's going to get pulled some sideways but instead of orientating this the way I should and this is a replacement for what I broke outside I want to see what happens when it crosses over the actual stem so dyema slips in a Double Fisherman at 10.39 and it gets real hot this actually held up better than I thought it would so now let's disect the thing and see how it's put [Music] [Music] together so it's interesting that the all the lower half is just purely plastic and it does take quite a bit of force to get these to move against that spring as the spring is attached on the sides so even though it's just two plastic flanges hold in together these side beams against the uh the center that it is it's holding it quite tight and this is just a solid plastic straw there's no cable inside or anything that you're basically shoving up through that Center Hole by utilizing this uh lever mechanism so on this type of Cam you can see there's two axles on this one but they're pretty small and so being able to have such a large axle which is more or less the weak part of any cam is uh probably the advantage of what makes this so strong if placed really well probably can't see inside of there but this screw basically goes into that and this plastic doesn't allow this to go left or right so it's actually pretty solid in there even though these side components feel loose and it's only really being held up by the little plastic arm that's being pushed up against from the spring uh that's you know pretty good solid setup it's very interesting how this is made so I reused part of the cord here and I still have light in this one I'm going to save these and I'm going to wait for your comments to see what I should do with them in the break test machine and if we break them you won't want to miss that so make sure you sign up for our emails so you see what's coming out and you don't depend on the algorithm to let you know if you guys are actually interested in more cam tests we tested the ultral light from Black Diamond and we actually got to go to their lab where they created this with the people who created it so if you'd like you can go check out that video next