I’ve recently had a couple of visits to Wrysgan mine and taken the opportunity to place a few new anchors and remove the cable from the Floor 3 traverse and some older rusty hardware.I’ve updated and built on original rigging guides produced by Gethin Thomas and these new versions are freely available for use by …
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Author:Pete
Outdoor professional and enthusiast.
Loads on a 5:1 Tensioning System
Tyroleans have been a bit of hot topic with me recently. I’ve developed some sites to use in my woodland near Whaley Bridge and been involved in some testing with BCA Trainer Assessors for the LCMLA scheme. We’ve measured the actual forces held by the anchors in a number of tyroleans but a really interesting …
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Coiling Caving Ladders
Caving ladders are an integral part of the LCMLA Level 2 award. Being practiced with a ladder not only saves time but lots of faff. It can be hard to pack loosely coiled ladders into tackle bags, meaning they get dragged and thrown about the cave, something that no kit really deserves. Practice coiling your …
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Review – Petzl Club, semi-static rope
I had an email about a month ago from Shaun at Hitch n Hike. He’d been sent a 70m sample rope from Petzl to evaluate and once it came out of the box and he saw the colour, he knew who to call. This rope was a 70m coil, sold in an un-shrunk condition. Rather …
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LCMLA Level 2 – Dec 2015
The North Wales panel of the Local Cave & Mine Leader Award scheme has just run a block of courses based out of Oaklands OEC near Llanwrst. I am a member of the N Wales panel and I will be working alongside other T/A’s as I move towards completing my assessor apprenticeship. The centre was host to 2 …
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Woodland Tyrolean Development
Recently I headed out to our private woodland site to have a play with my new Rock Exotica Enforcer. We have recently developed a tyrolean crossing here along with calculations of anticipated loads and safety factors. Using the Enforcer on this tyrolean would give a real world check of my calculated figures as well as giving me …
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Pulling SPIT anchors – Back garden test
This week I thought I’d embark on a little back garden test of some brand new SPIT self driving anchors and some SPIT Grip 10mm sleeve anchors. Both take a normal M8 bolt and hanger and can be found in caves and mines across the UK. The Grip sleeves are placed with a drill and only …
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Pull Testing Ground Anchor Pins
It is quite common that where you need to anchor ropes to things, there are no natural things there to anchor to (like boulders). Climbers and cavers get round this by installing bolts and/or ground anchors. A ground anchor is a (hopefully) long length of angle, pole or bar that is driven in deep and …
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Can you cut rope with a household jet washer?
After the last blog post where I tried to compare washing a caving rope in a washing machine to jet washing I thought I’d try to see how much damage I could do to a rope with a jet washer. This photo was from the previous test where I exposed the rope to a full …
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Thoughts on jet washing caving ropes
I thought I’d ponder a little bit about the ‘myth’ of jet washers and caving ropes. I say myth because it appears that there is no real test data out there in the caving community. Recent caving forum discussions about jet washing happened to coincide with an associate company requesting we don’t use jet washers …
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