The first I heard about this new fancy DMM krab was around three years ago when a friend of mine - who worked at their Llanberis factory- complained that he’d strained his groin by repeatedly jumping off the Beacon climbing wall. When I asked him how come, he just looked around to make sure no one was listening and said “Testing top secret karabiners.” At the time I thought top secret karabiners? What more could anyone dream of doing to the humble karabiner?
At the time wiregates were still pretty new and with karabiners getting lighter and even stronger by the season, it seemed hard to imagine what could be so special, apart from if they’d found a way of making them out of plastic or something. Being a gear freak though it bugged me that I couldn’t for the life of me think of any way to make an actual jump in karabiner design believing that, yet again, I’d be disappointed by a product that offered nothing more than impressive than a makeover of an existing product, giving it a trendier name and a new coat of anodising.
A year later I walked on to the DMM stand at a trade show and was handed a small industrial looking non-anodised karabiner; “We’re going to call it the Revolver” we think it’s pretty radical, said the salesperson. I looked at it for a while. It wasn’t that lightweight, but it looked bloody strong, but did it need to be any stronger than a conventional karabiner. The design was sort of radical, with some new form of cutaway hot forging obviously being used, but again why bother? Then I noticed something odd about it; it had a strange sort of pulley wheel built into it.
My first thought was that all they’d had up their sleeve was some kind of pointless rescue or top roping Karabiner, designed to replace the pulleys on a skiers harness usually clipped due to wanting to look suitably dressed for the part when skiing down the Vallee Blanche, even though the wearer probably has no idea what it’s for. Great I thought, it’ll come out to a huge fanfare “the biggest safety leap since the chalk ball”
It was then that Fred Hall, one of DMM’s owners and their chief designer wandered over and asked me what I thought. “It looks good,” I said, which is my usual reply when asked about anything at a trade show, holding back my real thoughts until I’m back at my computer. It’s only a prototype but I think it’s pretty revolutionary, he said and I was tempted to say something like “Yes, best comedy since Bend it like Beckham”, but luckily I didn’t. Yes I think it could take a ton of weight off your arms when climbing, not to mention how great it’ll be for meandering pitches.
I looked down at the karabiner again and with that one sentence saw something completely different I could actually see that this could be something very special indeed. Unfortunately, like all great designs, it took another two years until an envelope dropped through my door containing a finished Revolver, finally giving me the chance to use it for real and discover for myself if Fred really had come up with something that deserved the overused word, revolutionary.
THE REVOLVER “WHAT IS IT?”
Before I get into whether or not this karabiner works let’s look at it. The body of the karabiner is a familiar DMM shape, not unlike the classic Mamba, giving it a deep and large opening gate. The body is made by the now familiar hot forging technique, used to move metal to where it’s needed and away from less stress prone areas. The change is that DMM have developed a technique that further shaves the metal off the body by actually moving metal away from within sections of the karabiner’s body, creating recessed areas and forming a kind of frame effect and it’s no doubt due to this that the karabiner comes in at a light 50 grams, a very respectable weight considering the beef of the design.
The gate is the now familiar wire design, which reduces weight, gate chatter and stickiness due to ice, salt or dirt. The stainless steel wiregate gives the karabiner a larger gate opening than a traditional gate with the added bonus that accidental unclipping is reduced when compared to a bent gate karabiner clipped incorrectly. I’ve no doubt that a screwgate must also be on the cards also?
The pulley itself (11mm in diameter) is made from alloy and is held upon a stainless steel spindle and self-lubricating bearing, with the whole lot sitting within a beefed-up bottom part of the body of the karabiner. The pulley wheel is designed to rotate even when taking 11kN of load - which is pretty impressive when you consider how thin the spindle must be.
SO WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY DO
One of the climber’s biggest enemies - apart from gravity and the ground that is - is friction, as it’s friction that gradually slows you down the higher you get and the more runners the rope runs through. Every climber must have experienced the gradual increasing feeling that their belayer has decided it would be funny to hand off the rope while you climb and, just before you reach the safety of the belay, asked a load of hefty rugby players to join him. The higher you climb the more the rope pulls harder and harder on the waist, often with the result that your harness ends up around your ankles or worse still you end up totally stuck.
Unfortunately friction is also a climbers best friend, as it’s also friction that slows you down when you lob off, from the friction of the rope fibres rubbing against each other, the wrap of the sheath over the top runner and your belayer’s fingers wrapped around the rope, all of which allows the rope to absorb your falling body and allows the whole belay chain to save your ass. The Revolver has been designed to give you greater control over this most important aspect of climbing physics, allowing you to turn down the friction exerted by the rope running through your karabiners by 30 to 40 percent. This much is obvious but what does that actually mean to you the climber? Well this can give you two big advantages.
GIVES YOU STAMINA
The actual idea for the Revolver apparently came about when Fred Hall was asked what stopped people doing the hardest moves. Part of his answer was weight, be that the weight of your body, the weight of your rack, or simply the weight of your ropes. This lead him to consider the effect friction had on the rope and how this increased the pull on the climber’s fingers. On a long route this can prove considerable and even on short outcrops this can be enough to stop a climber it their tracks if the friction becomes to great, either due to the line of the climb or the inexperience of the climber.
The obvious way to overcome this would be to stick a pulley on each krab, which would be effective but not very practical, but what about building a pulley into the karabiner itself? The Revolver does just this, reducing friction so that you can move much more easily, letting you pull less hard and hold on to more energy.
MAKES YOU SAFER
Friction not only saps your energy but also that of your protection, reducing your rope’s ability to stretch effectively, increasing the shock load on your gear. By employing a couple of Revolvers in strategic points along the length of your running belays you will be able to have a much greater amount of any force spread over a greater length of rope, dividing the force of a falling climber over a greater distance and so reducing the force on your top runner.
DOES THE CONCEPT WORK
Since getting hold of my first Revolvers, I’ve used them on most types of climbing, from multi-pitch climbing, outcrops, snow and ice and Alpine climbing and, first off, all I can say is that even after a fair bit of abuse the pulley wheel is still spinning. Due to the shape being based on an already excellent design they clip easily and give a reassuring degree of confidence due to their beefy body, but the question is, do they actually do what it says on the tin.
SAY GOODBYE TO ROPE DRAG
The first thing you notice when using these karabiners is how much drag you must have been suffering from all these years without even realizing it. Even on straightforward pitches the difference can be felt, often worryingly so, as you get the impression that you’ve actually neglected to actually clip into any gear. Of course, the first time you really notice it is on those routes with friction black spots, such as the backs of roofs, at the start of traverses and general zigzaggyness and although experience is the best way to avoid getting bogged down by drag, the difference can still be felt.
Another factor is that the Revolver is obviously far more rope friendly than any other karabiner on the market, something very important if your sport climbing, as the constant friction against the rope as it runs over the top krab when dogging will eventually wear out the rope ends. Of perhaps more importance for the sport climber is the difference the reduction in drag will make on long 20+m routes, especially when combined with the thinnest rope, perhaps making all the difference when you’re only a few moves from the chains.
For Alpine, mountain and ice climbing the Revolver is ideal, perhaps allowing you the luxury of a few extra pieces instead of running it out in fear of the dreaded rope drag slowing down your ascent. They are especially noticeable if you’re trying to squeeze the fully 60m out of a rope, reducing that walking into a hurricane stance often taken by climbers power climbing to the anchors up snow slopes. On big scrambly routes where you may be moving together and drag is often a problem due to the friction of the rock, a couple of Revolvers can just take the edge off it.
INCREASING THE MARGIN
I can’t vouch for the actual amount of force these karabiners would take in a fall onto a marginal piece of gear but it will make a difference and sometimes that’s all it takes to make a big difference in a fall. For headpointing, big walling, ice-climbing and anywhere marginal gear is found having a Revolver could not only make the actual stopping difference, but also provide you with a significant psychological boost, especially if matched to a ripper sling.
THE DOWNSIDE
Not everything is perfect with the Revolver concept and if we consider that at one time the aim was to increase not decrease friction in the system then it’s easy to see there may be problems. In the early days the big thing was reducing the shock loading to the belayer, as they would holding the leader via a waist belay and any major loading on them would not be good.
Modern belay devices make this slightly less of a problem but could still lead to dangerous forces being applied to belayers, especially lightweight ones, pulling them violently upwards. For this reason it’s advisable to make sure the first half-a-dozen runners are standard karabiners if possible, as it would be there the rope has the least amount of stretch, further increasing any shock loading on the belay. As a second precaution, if you are a lightweight belayer, then make sure you’re attached to something solid and wear a helmet.
ARE THEY WORTH THE MONEY
£15 for a single karabiner I could buy a quickdraw for less than that. Unfortunately this may well be the response of more than one climber, with the Revolver coming in at twice the price of most karabiners. But you have to look at what you are buying. It’s not just a piece of 10mm bar crudely bent to shape in some eastern European factory and sold by the bucket load.
No, this is something that is state of the art, both in engineering, design and concept which has had years of development put into it and I think it’s a great credit to people like DMM and Fred Hall that they can be bothered coming up with gear like this in a market that sees karabiners over £10 as expensive. Put it this way; imagine you were buying something of this quality for your mountain bike or camera? How much would you be paying then?
It must also be remembered that the Revolver isn’t necessarily designed to fully replace all your rope-clipping krabs, but is used alongside standard clips for most climbers, perhaps having anything from a couple to a 50-50 split and so the outlay is reduced. As with all gear of this type my advice is buy one and see what you think and at the end of the day you can always just clip it to your harness for skiing down the Valee Blanche.
CONCLUSION
I asked Fred if he thought the Revolver would catch on and he said: Yes perhaps in about three years the idea will be accepted, and then he asked me if I knew what Yvon Choinard, the legendary owner of Patagonia and Chouinard Equipment (which later became Black Diamond) had said when he had sight of Ray Jardine’s Friend: It’ll never catch on.
Like the Predator axe, which was derided by many as unneeded and over-designed for climbing, yet went on to eventually change all technical axes as we know them. I think DMM are ahead of the game and. Like other new technology such as MP3 players etc, I expect only about 3 percent of climbers will initially see their potential and understand that what we have been given is a genuinely revolutionary piece of hardware. I just hope that 97 percent find a place for it in their racks as well so that it makes it worth the while of companies like DMM and others to come up with groundbreaker gear like this.
Andy Kirkpatrick
High Magazine December 2004
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