UKC

Trad cams to get which ones ? And how many in a set? 

In reply to Davy Murphy:

Needlesports have 30% off BD C4's. Purple, Green, Red and Gold would be the obvious four to get, takes you from finger cracks to big hands. 

In reply to purplemonkeyelephant:

What he said, very little between dragons and c4s so just get the cheapest.

In reply to Davy Murphy:

Totems. There is no other option. They are worth the extra money over a cheap set of old C4s, and they'll last a very long time. In larger sizes that Totems don't cover I have Dragons, but there's very little in it I'd say. Go into a shop, fondle some and go with what you feel handles best. If they're not the cheapest, well the extra £30 or whatever won't matter in five years, but that'll be five years of using the gear that feels best to you. Five years of not thinking 'agh why did I buy Dragons, I wish my cams had thumb loops!' or 'I wish I had Dragons, the extendable sling would be really great!'

Why Totems? They feel reassuring, especially in placements that aren't 100% perfect, in a way that other cams never have to me. Especially on rock types less suited to cams, such as limestone. I don't feel you lose anything with them compared to regular cams, and the benefits are several. And they just feel right. Which is worth a lot more when you're sketching above one than it is read on an online forum.

The sizes you start off with will be dictated by what types of rock you predominantly climb. For grit I'd go hands-downwards (so gold (or maybe blue)* downwards in every other size), for limestone you might want to start at the smaller end and work up. Most models of cam overlap by about 50% at each endof their range, so gold and green cover a continuous range of placements with no overlap, and the red covers the upper half of the green size and lower half of the red size.

* - gold in Camalot/Dragon money. Totems follow the same colour-coding for the most part, except the silver Camalot is yellow in Totems, and the gold Camalot is orange.

In reply to tehmarks:

Ha!  Well I'd say almost the same about Friends.

Everyone has their favourite.  I like the slightly grippier holding angle on friends.

Maybe not Rock Empire though.

In reply to Deadeye:

I think the Totems hold a huge advantage in the way that they can function essentially as an offset cam successfully and reassuringly in placements where conventional cams would be crap at best. That's one of the main reasons why I like them over conventional cams of any variety.

In reply to Deadeye:

Nah - had a go with most cams on market - Totems are simple better than the others because they will fit securely in more placements than other cams. 

In reply to purplemonkeyelephant:

You must have small hands!

In reply to Robert Durran:

But big fingers.

To the OP: My choice would be six Camalots in the sizes Grey to Blue. 

There is nothing wrong with Dragons or Friends, but Camalots are the original design.

Totems are great too.

In reply to Robert Durran:

Gold C4's have a range up to 65mm which would be pretty rattly for my hands. One mans fist jam is another mans offwidth though! 

In reply to Tom Ripley Mountain Guide:

Definitely, but add the small blue which seems to go in anywhere!

In reply to John Kelly:

I guess I got out off a bit by aliens

In reply to Tom Ripley Mountain Guide:

Correct me if I'm wrong and have been missing something for the last 40 years or so, but try telling Ray Jardine that. And Mark Vallance, if you could.

In reply to Martin Bennett:

Sorry I should have been more clear. BD developed and perfected the double axel design. In my view the Dragons and the (new) Friends are basically (very good) copies of that design. Plus I don't like doubled up slings.

In reply to Davy Murphy:

As a starter - I'd go for Camalots 0.75, 1 and 2.  Think about 0.5 for Wales.  For grit, think about 3 instead of 0.5.

In reply to tehmarks:

Nice 1 mark, yeah done some research and climbed in Spain with totems - they are amazing in flares and small cracks, I’ll get 3 to start with, then like you say bigger ones . Which 3 to start with, climb in tryfan wales when back to the uk. Did get a wild country size 4 grey big cam so totems next. Cheers for your help really appreciate it mate ✌🏻

In reply to Tom Ripley Mountain Guide: sorry Tom, you are extremely knowledgable about a lot of kit but saying the camalot is the best cam on the market because it was the first double axle is naieve at best and plainly wrong at worst. Dont misunderstand me its a good design but it has a very high camming angle, an inconsitent camming angle, amongst the widest heads, amongst the heaviest unless you count the new ones, they are less stable in placements and when you look at the range there are big gaps in coverage. Would i buy a set? Yes. Would I claim they are the best, not even close.

In reply to tehmarks:

Totems look well designed. I don't know whether they are an essential piece of kit worth paying the extra £30 though. There's specific routes where I've thought in retrospect that I'd have been in trouble without brasses, offsets, micro cams, or tricams (winter), but I've always got by with a regular set of Dragons. Reassurance is one thing, but unless there are specific routes that call for a Totem then they seem a luxury product.

On a separate note, for me the differences between DMMs, WCs, and BDs standard cams are small enough that I would get used to whatever if I was starting out again. I would probably buy whatever has the best deal. 

In reply to Mr. Lee:

Not only that but you could argue that their design puts more outward force on placements which is not always beneficial - these things were originally intended for aid climbing where you are talking about body weight placements and extremely tenuous placements. Everybody seems to have forgotten that and are now saying they are the best thing since sliced bread. They actively increase the outward force which makes it more likely to pulverise soft rock and to break flakes. Rock pulverisation can lead to pull out under certain circumstances. So I'm not entirely convinced that it's ALL good - again - a really clever and ingenious piece of kit but it's not possible to just say "this is the best". Quite frankly the idea that these things will last beyond the life of a normal cam has got to be a joke? The cables are far skinnier, the assembly more complex, the cam material is 6061-T6 which is softer than most out there...

In reply to beardy mike:

Hmmm interesting.

Camalots, Dragons and Friend are all the same sizes in their respective colours, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve owned all three over years and currently have mainly C4s on my rack. 

I use Camalots on an almost daily basis and can’t ever recall getting a placement where the correct size (nor the size either side) fitted well. 

While I understand that the other cams have a more consistent camming angle, I don’t really know what this means, and does this really matter in the real world? As far as I see it you put a camalot in, give it as a tug, clip and keep climbing. On conventional cam friendly rock climb grit, granite, and sandstone a good cam is a good cam. On low friction rock like limestone I prefer a Totem. 

However I am not experiencing Camalots ripping out when you lob on them (I don’t fall much) but I’m not hearing anicdotes of Camalots ripping out of placements where friends/dragons are bomber by comparison.

Please enlighten me. 

Btw I’d have been more inclined to buy friends if WC hadn’t given them extendable slings. Why did you do that?! Same from DMM torque nuts.

Tom

In reply to Tom Ripley Mountain Guide:

So literally the very first thing we did when we designed the WC range was collate all the information together in a graph and work up some statistics and graphs relating to the open and closed ranges of each size of most of the premium cams on the market. We looked at camming angle, the spread of the axles, the spread of each cam including how much they overlapped each other and then crunched the numbers. What we found that some of the camming ranges were exceedingly inconsistent. BD sizes get funny around red through to blue and the overlap is low on one and very high on the other - I can't remember which way round it goes - I seem to remember there is a large overlap between red and yellow and not much overlap between yellow and blue. The worst in terms of consistency were Metolius cams. 

The second thing we did was look at whether the cam was actually a logarithmic spiral. Metolius, Aliens and BD's all were not true logarithmic spirals, Metolius consistently increased their camming angle at the tipped out position (i.e. they've done it on purpose). Aliens were very hard to work out but didn't seem to have a consistent angle, and neither did BD. BD we worked out some were 15 degrees, some slightly less, and all of them did not stay true to the required curve. DMM's were consistent in this sense as were totem basics - we didn't consider totem totems as they were a truly different beast. What this means that you will see different amounts of friction across the range of the cam, different amounts of friction from cam to cam and in the case of a dual axle design, because you could potentially load the cam on an offset fashion particularly in a horizontal break where the lobes could be set on different parts of there active surface and result in a different amount of friction from one cam lobe to the other. Metolius has the lowest camming angle, 12.5 degrees I think it was, with Alien working out somewhere between 15 and 16.5 depending on the cam. The main point here though for me, is that BD did not quite get their spiral right compared to DMM and later on us which means as a dual axle design it's slightly flawed.

We also then looked very closely at how the overlap was affected by the distance that the axles are positioned apart. Again this was inconsistent across BD and DMM, meaning that as you go across the range it varies. I worked out a formula to ensure this was consistent across the range of cams so that they behaved in the most predictable way possible. 

So I guess what I'm getting at is, yes OK BD designed the first camalots but they did it without the aid of software packages which would make it easy to really analyse what they were doing in close detail. The friend cam lobes have literally been designed using an equation to define the curve of the cam surface - it is absolutely a perfect spiral. And we've optimised absolutely every aspect of the design to make the most consistent to use, predictable in performance and use units. Are you going to die by not using them, clearly not, are you buying a more advanced design buying DMM or WC, absolutely 100% yes. 

On to your other question about slings - this was a bone of contention. BD designed and patented an innovation to do with the sling to help prevent the permanent deformation of the stem cable. There was an attempt to bypass this patent with the Helium cam, but if you've used them you will know it actually made matters worse as they tended to get hung up on the side of the stem - it was less than optimal. So we set about looking at what affected the kinking of the stem wire. Width of the sling, size of the wire, the count of the wire (whether it was a super flexible 7x7 or a stiffer 1x7) and loading were all critical to the prevention of the kinking. We found that with a doubled sling clipped twice there was no discernible kinking until you reached 12kN, or 10kN when you had the sling extended. The Pigsnose on DMM is not the easiest thing to use, so we just decided to go for a simple loop, besides which DMM holds a patent on the pigsnose. We had other ideas but were not allowed the time to develop them fully. So the up shoot is, we debated whether to have a wide nylon open sling or an open extendible and 13mm wide dyneema sling. It was simply felt that it was a market advantage to have an extendable sling on a full thumbloop stem and we took the compromise of rating the cams for extended and non-extended placements. The cams exceed this ratings in strength, it's just that the stem cable becomes permanently deformed at that level.

So I guess you can take what you want from all this information - it's stuff that WC simply don't talk about because it's complicated, a bit dull and most climbers simply won't care - they are driven by price, how shiny something is, whether it's the "original" or the "latest" or the in trendy thing. I rather put the Totem into this catagory - the latest trendy thing, a solution which is being forced into a soultions for which it was not intended because people need to make money from the product they've designed. Do they work? Hell yes. Are the necessary? Nope.