Gear Breaking, Italian Style

Mar 9

Let's get one thing straight. The CAI has a terrific logo. =^)

Click below to watch the video.

As climbers, we never want our gear to break. But it sure can be fun watching people do it in the lab!

The Italian Alpine Club (Club Alpino Italiano, or CAI) founded in 1863, is the second oldest alpine club in the world. They have been doing gear tests like this for more than 50 years. They made a terrific video showing all manner of testing and destruction - ropes (both sudden drop test and slow motion steady pull, with and without knots), slings, carabiners and harnesses. Also, various tests of the flat overhand bend, with different combinations of rope material and diameter. Girth hitch? Yep, we got that too.

Lots of these gear testing videos are in the original language, often Italian or German. I paid to have subtitles added to this video so this important information could be brought to a wider audience. (That's why it's on my YouTube channel, but all content is from the CAI.)

Note, the units in this video are the kind of unusual “kgf”, or “kilogram force”. This is different than the more commonly used kilonewton (kN), which has a climber you are hopefully familiar with.

Fortunately, the math conversion is easy: simply move the decimal two places to the left for an approximate conversion to kilonewtons. For example, if something in the video broke 1268 kgf, move the decimal place to places to the left and you get around 12.6 kN. (technically it's about 12.4, but hey I'm not an engineer and that's good enough for me.)

Yep, they tested Dyneema girth hitches.