UKC

I know I am going to get called a dinosaur but........

You have to at least say something along the lines of "what was wrong with stacked hexentrics?" to be considered Jurassic.

Even older epithets are available 😁

Is this because the smaller ones are sized in that new fangled decimal system?

Should be labelled 3/4, 1/2, 2/5, 3/10 and 1/5 for clarity.

I got you bruh.

The old system was based on 1", 2", 3". Because a cam lobe is a logarithmic spiral, that means that to acheive a logical and smooth progression, the increase in size of the centre opening dimension of the cam should also increase logarithmically. Choosing 1, 2, 3 and half inches in-between is a linear progression which means the sizing bunches together and makes no sense at all. It was done for purely historical reasons, because that's how the extrusion tooling was made. So if you want to have gaps in your range of cams, carry on. If you want a range of cams where there are no gaps between sizes and where each cam has exactly the same amount of opening per cam unit, then you should look at the WC one because they are the only ones which actually follow that principle. DMM are close, BD really isn't and Metolius is still random...

Ah nice I didn't realise the numbers were inches. 

Stacked Moacs?

Why did you think it was so simple then? To you it was a completely unrelated number?

Yes, when you look at a US guidebook you'll see that that is how they list the gear you need for a route, or aleast it was 30 years ago. They'd say cams between .5" and 2". The reason the numbers were changed was simply to fit in with the competitors numbering system. In the upper sizes the size to inch is still broadly correct but it breaks down a bit below 1. I argued for maintaining the midrange inch dimension as the number but I was shot down in a burning ball of fire by marketing who though having a 0.45 size was ridiculous 🤣

The original WC Technical cams they weren't sized in inches. Look at the Wild Country book - https://www.wildcountry.com/media/pdf/c9/92/40/Wild-Country-Cam-book.pdf

An old Size 1 cam had the range of 19–29mm, an old Size 2 cam had the range of 29–44mm, an old Size 3 cam had the range of 43–66mm. So perhaps it was closer to 1 finger, 2 fingers, 3 fingers. I know that's how I use to check which size to use. 

My take is that the original size one friend was the smallest size that worked with the original rigid stem. 

As you note , all full larger sizes just overlap, allowing logical half sizes in between.

As Mike notes, other manufacturers sort of overlap/ progressive sizes.

Twin axle cams tend to have a larger range, different manufacturers have alterative takes on what is a number one. Colour coding is also a bit of a mess.

That is a probably closer to the truth. 

I seem to remember it was the top end of the range, but even that doesn't quite work. Would make the upper end of a 3 75mm.

I'll have to dig out my excel spreadsheet which shows the inconsistency of the old numbers - the old friends were really all over the place. Anyway, the change was in response to moving to double axle cams and them trying to make it all as consistent as possible. Colours and numbers were carried over from competitiors so that it's easy for people with a mixed rack.

I was always under the impression that the Camalot sizes (now adopted by WC and DMM) were in inches to go along with the US tendency to describe crack widths in inches. I don't have one to hand but I would have thought an old size Frend 2, say, was somewhat narrower than two inches, whereas a new "gold" size 2 would be about two inches.

And what about the size 1/2 rigid stem; a work of beauty 😁

Nah. Only lasted a few months before the flexi half came out.

I'm hoping that has changed! I'd have to go through the cams to work out which was 2 inches. Much easier just to say e.g. "cams up to red".

This whole inches thing is a nonsense, as beardy mike explained earlier. Attempting to keep numbering even vaguely related to inches is destined either to failure or to a suboptimal range of sizes, because inches simply don't 'grow' in the same way that cam ranges do. If I were a new manufacturer I'd be tempted to label sizes completely differently, maybe using letters instead of numbers. Maybe A,B,C,... for main sizes and α,β,γ,... for micros so they both can be open ended and future proof.

Look on the bright side, most manufacturers' colour schemes are now mostly a bit similar...

Is that the titanium one with the double cord system?
If so, I've still got one.

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong. Definite possibility... but even if its BD its still a load of rubbish... well it is unless you find the middle of the range and call it by that number. Then it'd be vaguely useful.

Yes, but it does seem to roughly work for the original Camalot sizes 1,2,3,4 I had in the eighties (the entire range of the first model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camalot), but maybe struggled as more sizes were added.

I think I might just label them by colour; what everyone calls them now anyway!

There's only one thing wrong with Totems, and that's that their colours are wrong!

It's possible that this annoys me more than it really should.

I’ve been using the latest WC flexi Friends for 2 or 3 years now. 

The first Friend I ever owned, I actually retrieved from a stuck placement on Lubyanka in 1980.  As a fresh faced 17 year old, I was absolutely made up! It was a rigid Friend 2.

I’ve used countless versions of Friends over the years, and I certainly appreciated that when someone told be a crucial placement was (for example) a Friend 1, I knew exactly what that meant.

Sadly that is no longer the case….

But there is a silver lining!  Once I got used to the new sizing, and resigned myself to being more selective on the beta I trusted, I’ve found the new rack to be by far the best cams I’ve ever used.

Beardy Mike and the others involved in their development are to be congratulated on the new range they have produced.

And before anyone asks, no, I have no affiliation with Wild Country.

Neil

Nor have I! I was a contractor...

i was mightily pissed off at that point.

That's the one. Apparently a lot of them succumbed to corrosion/fusion because the 3 metals (shaft, cams, nuts IIRC) can easily set up some kind of electrolytic reaction - basically getting wet (salty water?) and not being properly cleaned and dried.

So we are amongst a small select group (I'm assuming we're not the last 2).

Yes  Titanium doesn't play nicely with (I think) either Alumnium or Stainless. But particularly Aluminium if my memory serves me correctly. Same process as Galvanised steel and stainless, replacing ions and ending up with Swiss cheese.

My mistake, its carbon steels and titanium which are reactive which would make sense, I belive because of the higher carbon content compared to Stainless.

If you look at the chart in this link, the further apart the metals are on the cart the more reactive they will be:

https://structx.com/Material_Properties_001.html

You could dye them?

Dye won't be taken up by dyneema, that's why it's white...

WC sizes were defacto for my climbing for many years and then Camalots became available but were still approximately the same sizes. So no I didn't need them to be inches as I am of that age that inches were only used to measure one thing.

I do think the colour convergence helps though.

They really weren't the same sizes and never have been. a Friend size one was similar to a 0.4  Camalot but slightly larger, 0.5 was like a 1.5, then it kinda all went to hell in a hand basket...

I can't get my head around different colour sizes. "Pass me a yellow"

Wtf size is that? We knew where we were with a size 3 Friend!

My first cams were Helium friends and I diligently completed my set despite all my peers using the alternate Dragon /camalot system. They all thought I was mad, and this thread shows I was. I was carrying loads cams, especially in the smaller sizes, and covering not as big a range. I've recently bought a new set of WC friends and the difference is huge. Should have done it years ago. 

The current state of affairs is objectively superior as beardy Mike has brilliantly explained. The only reason one would prefer the old system is simply because one is familiar with it and doesn't want to learn the new (better) system. That's fine and makes logical sense , but let's call it what it is! Familiarity is a very powerful force. 

Because the camalots cover a good size range, there's inevitably a point midway between certain sizes where neither is that good (over-cammed or under-cammed). E.g. the Friend 3.5 covers that bit between yellow and blue camalot. Then again, given the choice of adding it in just in case, I'd probably just take two yellows instead.

Eh what? Unless you're using old cams, totems or fairly random brands, the colours are the same? A yellow WC Friend is near as damn it the same size and range as a yellow DMM Dragon or a BD C4. How is it harder to get your head around that than the old skool s*** show?

Not sure about that one either. There is a range over lap on each cam, regardless of whether they are old WC Friends or new ones or camalots. Certainly for the WC New Friends I made sure that the overlap was 100% consistent. And that overlap percentage was broadly similar to old cams, which as I've stated ad nauseum in this thread, was all over the place. Honestly, when I first did the maths it was what shocked me the most out of everything, that all the brands were doing stuff which was seemingly totally random. It took some smooshing around to get the numbers right but it really is consistent as it possibly could be whilst trying to stick to the approximate ranges of other brands so that nobody needs to get their knickers in a twist about different brand cams not fitting in with other brands. We had loads of discussions about this - I suggested adding a cam to the range so that they broadly overlaid the old friend cams and provided loads of overlap. Well the downside is that that means that you guys have to buy an extra cam making the range more expensive to purchase. And I'm guessing that with climbers being the way they are, they'd buy BD or DMM because it saves them 75 quid. In addition to which, to add that extra size you're talking circa 8k in tooling alone. I also suggested making a set of single axle Alpine friends with less overlap which would be lighter and cheaper and that was turned down. There are soooo many variables in this stuff and in the end the people who are selling it have to make a decision on which way to go with it all and it's simply not going to please every one. 

I've always agreed with what used to be seen as the beneficial aspects of the stem being able to rotate around the axle freely after being moved by any rope movement without potentially disturbing the placement, like it (perhaps largely theoretically) may do with double axle cams/friends, in principle that design has 1 element less which might cause an issue.

It might in practice be more theoretical than anything else, but that's why I like single axle cams/friends. Hopefully this year my elbows may get sorted.

If the springs are strong enough, and the stem flexible enough, that could plausibly make it unlikely to happen that any rope movement would disturb the cam placement, but the stem being able to move on it's axis without disturbing the placement still appeals 'on a mechanical level'. A lot of design is compromise, and it might be one which is fine.

Yes, and few people seem to appreciate this. The old style friends beautifully interleave the Camalot (and now DMM/new Friend) sizes. An old 2, say, might fit perfectly when a green is a bit baggy and a red rather tight. My standard rack consists of Camalots from small grey to big blue plus old style friends from zero to 2.5 (I might add smaller or larger ones as required). I have the best of both worlds, obviously better than a double set of either.

When the new style Friends came out I bought two additional sets of old style friends (one cheap in the US and one second hand on here), so that I would be able to continue with this system hopefully indefinitely.

Unfortunately, as climbing partners have tended to become less familiar with the old style friends, this can cause issues when putting together a mutual rack. If they try it openmindedly and persevere a bit, they do tend to come round to the strengths of my system, but, when necessary, I have sometimes had to carry my old style friends when seconding so that I can have them on lead.

A yellow WC Friend is an old 2.5. The new one a bit bigger is gold. Surely everyone knows that!

Believe it or not I had your words ringing in my ears as we were working on it. I do feel what you're saying is fairly niche but I can understand your perspective on it. As I said, one of the thoughts had been to do a set of Alpine Friends, super light and cheaper to manufacture than double axle cams which overlaid the Camalot sizes and to then interleave sizes at a mid point between each. The money saved on making the extra axle terminations could have been used to build intermediate sized forged cam lobes, but it was not to be, mostly for internal and completely uncontrollable reasons which to my mind didn't actually make sense. But sometimes in a job you just have to accept what the "boss" is saying and go with it. I suspect had I got my way we might have been in a very different place to where we now are with very little to differentiate between the different brands. Is what it is really...

What are your thoughts on what used to be marketed as the plus point of single axle technical  friends, re it being something of a safer design because of the stem being able to rotate around it and not disturb the placement?

It might be a 'How long is a piece of string?' style question, how much that makes any difference in practice...

I mean it's a thing, but there's a distinct lack of people lying at the base of crags with their leg up by their ear because of it isn't there.

I'd say the bigger issues with single axle cams were the cams getting overcammed much more easily, the range and the cams rotating as you pull them out and some how getting all hooked up on the sides of the crack. There are solutions for all those things though.

On the plus side there's what you've cited, the lobes are smaller for the size and inherently stronger, theres only one axle so half the weight, theres no end plates, the spring is simpler, the stem terminations can be reusued for multiple sizes where as the axle terms on the double axle cams are individual for each size because the spread required between the axles varies (infact this distance is one of the important variables for how much range you get and WC are the only ones which use a consistent spread which is one of the reasons for the others being slightly random - but it's pretty marginal and noone would notice unless someone told you so), and they are cheaper to produce (fewer and lighter parts).

Ta for the info, that's interesting to know. I guess 'being of benefit to humanity' is over egging it, but when a product seems well sorted & thought out, like single axle technical friends, I can have the sense that they almost deserve to continue being made, or that they should be 'just because', but it could become a cluttered world if that were to happen.

https://www.velobase.com/ViewComponent.aspx?ID=863e6b89-3b61-450d-a081-90fd...

I've always liked these Campagnolo Record hubs in silver polished guise, they have a threaded axle and a single adjustable collar, and loose ball cup and cone bearings, and the collar makes it very simple to adjust them to 'just right'. They still use the mechanism in their higher end hubs, but the only Record hubs one can buy now are an ugly black and angular design in 32 holes. I recently paid for a couple of 28 hole hubs to make a set, and consciously forget the price I'd paid.