UKC

In a new series on UKClimbing, we have teamed up with Plas-y-Brenin, the National Mountain Sports Centre, to cover a wide range of basic climbing techniques.. We will be explaining everything from putting on harnesses and tying figure of eights, to building belays and leading.

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In reply to UKC Articles:

I haven't watched the video, but without watching it I can say that it's a shame you didn't show a wide range of suboptimal placements, different cam types, and do an in-depth comparison of cams, tricams and hex placements in the same crack. Must do better UKC.

In reply to climbwhenready: And mugging to the camera, we need more of that.

In reply to UKC Articles:

I thought that was loads better than some of the others.

Would have thought it worth mentioning about angling the stem in the direction of potential loading.

In reply to climbwhenready: very good!

In reply to UKC Articles:

Good video. My guess is that if people followed these basic, commonsense principles, there would be a lot less stuck cams littering the crags.

Mick

In reply to UKC Articles:

It's good that these vids are coming out but there are simple details missing in some of them such as load direction as already mentioned. There's a few vids from the Glenmore Lodge I found very useful when on the learning curve and I seem to rememeber they covered a bit more. All this stuff is good though.

In reply to UKC Articles:

From the title I thought it was going to be about offwidths...

In reply to UKC Articles:

Ugh! Ok, so some of these might be nit-picking but every one hit me straight away when watching this and I'm kinda surprised that nobody who did the editing thought "must go back and fix/add that".
Chronologically:
- Does active need moving parts? I always thought that a tricam or a hex placed in a cammed position was an active placement, maybe I'm wrong.
- You should never place a cam in the full open position indicated at the start of the video (unless its a passive placement), this is referred to when placing the red cam but starting off with "this yellow cam would be save from fully cammed to about 1/3 camed" would have been much better.
- The ideal placement is over-cammed to hell, not middle of the range! Safety first, I don't care if my second curses me the entire way up the pitch. During my climbing career, I have noticed a direct correlation between years of experience climbing and degree of overcamming when placing pro.
- There is no mention that horizontal placements should usually be done with the wide apart lobes at the bottom for stabilities sake (though it is shown placed in this way).
- There is no mention of the angle of loading and consequently the angle a cam should ideally be placed at in a vertical crack.
- There is no mention of using those nice extender slings on the Dragon/Camalot device shown.
- There is only the briefest of mentions of using cams in non-parallel sided cracks. An in depth discussion of camming angles of different devices vs increasingly flared cracks might be a bit above and beyond but a simple demo of marginal placements in flared cracks and completely failing placements in very flared cracks would have only taken a few seconds.
- Similarly, it would have been nice to show that a 4 lobe cam can still work with one lobe sticking out of the crack.
- A mention of increased force on rock over a passive placement would have been good (i.e. in dubious flakes or soft rock, put in a nut instead of a cam if at all possible.)

Ok, I'm done whining now

In reply to henwardian:

I look forward to your video on cam technique

In reply to jsmcfarland:


I might take you up on that challenge.
But in the meantime, I'll just point out the obvious: One does not need to have done something themselves to review the effort of someone else, I mean, you don't really think the Guardian newspapers' film critic has starred in and directed 100 mil dollar films, do you?