A small collection of esoteric climbing protection
Over the years, I have retrieved, bought, swapped, saved from a land fill, various bits of climbing equipment. Here's some from my private collection.
Just click on the pictures to download a full sized 6 mega-pixel version, about 1.5mb each.
Note: I have tried to annotate them to the best of my knowledge but if you do know something about the history, manufacture and use of these esoteric pieces of climbing protection or
if you have a retired one that will make up my set, please email me.
I'd love to hear from you.
Micro-wires
These are Faces brass alloy micro-wires, size 2 to 5. Faces was
set up and run by the late Alison Hargreaves. I don't know very much about these nor even what they were called.
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Close up of the nuts showing detail of the soldering and brazing work with a 5 pence piece for scale. |
Shape and profile of the nuts. Notice the slight change in angle on the underside ( right nut) |
In my opinion, HB Anchors were the best bit of small protection for slate.
They were made by the late Hugh Banner from a softer brass alloy that was designed to deform.
This resulted in much lower shear forces when the nut was loaded and a much higher chance of that squeaky slate flake staying on the route.
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Detail of the soldering and brazing work, sizes 1 to 5 |
Shape and profile of the nuts. |
Another fantastic HB invention, the Jewels were the smallest bits of small protection, ever!
This is disposal protection, if you lob on one, make sure you throw it away so you won't do it again.
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This is my last one, all the others did a damn good job. And yes! That is a lentil! |
Passive camming devices
Camp Pentagons size 1 to 4. These nuts can be used like their cousins, the Hexentrics but they only have 5 sides.
This improves their passive camming ability
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5-sided eccentric shape of the Pentagons improve their camming ability.
Note the clever positioning of the wire's swivel point, which is at the geometric centre of the pentagon.
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View of the swivel fixture and swaging. These units are pretty rare now.
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Miscellaneous Information
The "P" prefixed pictures were taken using an Olympus Mju 300 compact digital. They are all less than 2 mbytes.
The "DSCF" prefixed pictures were taken using a Fuji FinePix S7000 digital camera @ ISO ASA 200.
Note: Usual copyright & disclaimers apply. If you would like to use the information or any of the pictures contained in these pages,
contact Chris Tan by first removing the Walnut.
Last Updated: 28 February 2009
