Petzl Spirit Biner breaks from normal lead fall

bearbreeder wrote:interesting how a notchless biner ... in fact one of the "best" biners in the world ... can still get nosehooked and broken

Interesting that when a product is misused it will break no matter how good it is.

S. Neoh wrote:Current thinking is top and bottom biners on a sport draw should face the same direction, not opposed as many of us had done for many years (~15 in my case).

Who exactly represents "current thinking"? I actually carry draws set in both orientations and I may use one directional setup versus the other if I may be taking a sideways fall etc; this however, has zero to do with the actual strength of the setup during the loading process in a fall. Just curious because from doing a casual free body diagram in my head, I can't see how the direction of the bottom biner makes any difference whatsoever when its loaded (obviously provided it is not cross loaded).

This is why I use only lockers. I have a hundred lockers on my rack, I learned this from Locker.

Even my racking draws for my cams are lockers!

I emailed Petzel directly and received this from them. This is the exact text:

"We only recommend carabiners facing the same direction. I have attached a page from our carabiner product experience that is available for download from our website in the carabiner section. Having the gates facing opposite directions increases the chance of the top carabiner getting hung up or unclipped by the bolt it is clipped to.
Let me know if you have any more questions. "

I am having trouble downloading the Technical booklet for the Spirit draw from Petzl's website, there seems to be something wrong with the PDF file, but I will post a link to that as soon as I can.

Wylie wrote:I emailed Petzel directly and received this from them. This is the exact text: "We only recommend carabiners facing the same direction. I have attached a page from our carabiner product experience that is available for download from our website in the carabiner section. Having the gates facing opposite directions increases the chance of the top carabiner getting hung up or unclipped by the bolt it is clipped to. Let me know if you have any more questions. " I am having trouble downloading the Technical booklet for the Spirit draw from Petzl's website, there seems to be something wrong with the PDF file, but I will post a link to that as soon as I can.

That is all fine and dandy but it has absolutely nothing to do with this incident.

kennoyce wrote:That is all fine and dandy but it has absolutely nothing to do with this incident.

How do you figure? Petzl said:

Petzl wrote:Having the gates facing opposite directions increases the chance of the top carabiner getting hung up or unclipped by the bolt it is clipped to.

And I think it's pretty clear that the top draw in this incident got hung up on the bolt.

This is a good reminder when bolting sport routes to be aware of trying to have more than one bolt keeping you from a ground fall. That obviously is not always possible without being ridiculous, but something to think about. Draws do get kicked accidentally or otherwise flipped into odd positions that can break or unclip a beaner. Using glue-in bolts like the Fixes placed at a bit of an angle down (so the top of the eye is more countersunk),as they suggest, also helps lessen chances of unclipping.

I remember being on some routes down south with very sparsely bolted initial (sandy) faces and then over bolted roofs at the top and thinking they weren't too well thought out (happens all over, not just down south obviously). The whole idea of a sport route is to have it reasonably safely bolted, not be macho like some trad mentality. You need to get well up in the air before you can make the runs more airy.

Petzl's technical notice for the new Spirit draw here states only that "The gate of the rope-end carabiner must always face away from the climber's direction of travel"

While all the drawings in the technical notice show the gates of both the anchor and rope end biners facing the same direction, they don't state anywhere that they must face the same direction. It's a matter of personal preference, not safety. Having them face the same direction on quickdraws does somewhat simplify clipping when you know that the biner you're about the clip to the anchor is facing the same way as the biner you're about the clip the rope into.

The direction the biners were facing doesn't look to have had any bearing on the failure of the anchor end biner in this case. Simply a matter of the nose being pinned between the hanger and the bolt.

May have been less likely to happen if biner on the anchor had been clipped with the gate facing right as opposed to left.

kennoyce wrote: That is all fine and dandy but it has absolutely nothing to do with this incident.

Lol that seems to be EXACTLY what we are talking about in this incident. Where have you been??

Ian Stewart wrote: How do you figure? Petzl said: And I think it's pretty clear that the top draw in this incident got hung up on the bolt.

If you read the report of what happened, the draw was bumped by the climbers leg into that position. The direction of the lower biner had absolutely nothing to do with the biner ending up in the position that caused it to break.

kennoyce wrote:If you read the report of what happened, the draw was bumped by the climbers leg into that position. The direction of the lower biner had absolutely nothing to do with the biner ending up in the position that caused it to break.

I read the report.

Petzl says that a) the gate on the rope-end biner should be opposite the direction of travel, and that b) the biners should be facing the same direction.

In this situation, these guidelines weren't followed: (a) was followed but (b) was not. The result was that the top biner was facing the wrong direction, got hung up on the bolt, and snapped off. It doesn't matter how the draw got into that position.

Ian Stewart wrote: It doesn't matter how the draw got into that position.

Yes it does. That is perhaps the only thing that matters, which I think is kennoyce's point.

Ian Stewart wrote: In this situation, these guidelines weren't followed: (a) was followed but (b) was not. The result was that the top biner was facing the wrong direction, got hung up on the bolt, and snapped off.

Just because "guideline" (b) was not followed does not necessarily imply that it was the reason for the biner getting hung up (i.e. correlation does not equal causation). In fact, I am sort of skeptical of Petzl's interpretation of how draws get hung up because I have witnessed it occurring with biners in every permutation of draw setup. Probably the only way that truly fixes the problem is to use the old crusty trad trick of flipping the top biner after you clip it to the bolt.

J. Albers wrote:Just because "guideline" (b) was not followed does not necessarily imply that it was the reason for the biner getting hung up (i.e. correlation does not equal causation). In fact, I am sort of skeptical of Petzl's interpretation of how draws get hung up because I have witnessed it occurring with biners in every permutation of draw setup. Probably the only way that truly fixes the problem is to use the old crusty trad trick of flipping the top biner after you clip it to the bolt.

I never said the reason the draw got hung up was because of the direction of the gate, but it's naive to ignore the direction of the biner as a contributing factor especially when it's been explicitly pointed out by the manufacturer to be a known problem.

Like you said, correlation does not equal causation. But you could say the same thing about the whole "biner was kicked by the climber" (which, for the record, was just a guess by the climber).

Would the biner have gotten hung up if the climber didn't kick it? Possibly not.
Would the biner have gotten hung up if the biner was facing the right direction? Possibly not.

All of these things are factors that COULD HAVE contributed to the incident. You can't discard them just because you think you know better than Petzl.

Also, just because you've seen properly clipped biners get hung up on draws does NOT mean that they are just as likely to get hung up as improperly clipped ones. That's like saying that "I saw a guy crash his motorcycle and die when he was wearing a helmet, so I don't believe that wearing a helmet makes it any safer".

Ian Stewart wrote:Would the biner have gotten hung up if the biner was facing the right direction? Possibly not.

Quoting myself here: my use of "right" direction here isn't fair. It's not even clear from the story where the climber was in relation to the draw, so for all we know the top biner could have been facing the correct direction. Or, what is often the case, the climber was right above the bolt or wandering left and right so one direction isn't any more ideal than the other.

Ian Stewart wrote: Also, just because you've seen properly clipped biners get hung up on draws does NOT mean that they are just as likely to get hung up as improperly clipped ones. That's like saying that "I saw a guy crash his motorcycle and die when he was wearing a helmet, so I don't believe that wearing a helmet makes it any safer".

You are certainly correct here. In fact I have actually given quite a bit of thought to which orientation is more likely to hang up, but alas all I have is my own (and my partners) anecdotal evidence. To make things worse, I think that some biner designs are more prone to getting hung. That said, my anecdotal evidence suggests that biners get hung more often when they are clipped into the hanger in the orientation shown in this picture (bottom bolt):

mountainproject.com/images/…

My of my partners strongly disagrees with me though, so who knows.

J. Albers wrote:That said, my anecdotal evidence suggests that biners get hung more often when they are clipped into the hanger in the orientation shown in this picture (bottom bolt): mountainproject.com/images/…

I think you're actually talking about how the biner is clipped in relative to the orientation of the hanger/bolt instead of relative to the climber's position, right?

So, in that picture, the hangers are tilted such that the left side points down and the right side (with the bolt) points up. You would prefer to clip "upwards" such that the biner goes in from the left and the gate faces the right. Am I correct? I don't know if that's actually preferable but personally if it's not clear which side of the draw I'll be on, I tend to clip it that way too...it just seems to sit so much nicer and be more confidence inspiring, heh.

BTW, I think that lower draw is in the EXACT position it would need to be in for it to snap like the one in the original link. It also looks like the perfect example of how it's hard to tell which way is "right": from below, it looks like the line goes right...but once you've clipped and move past the bolt you end up to the left. It's this sideways motion while above the draw that probably put it in that wanky position to begin with.

I am guessing this flipping and catching of the biner is more likely to happen when it is back clipped as well.

Carabiners break.........

End of story....

Move on......

Colonel Mustard wrote: The practice always strikes me as some backwards application of "opposite and opposed".

I've always figured that it made clipping the draw to bolt, with the gate facing away, and clipping the rope to draw, with the gate facing toward you, both slightly more efficient.

This biner breaking doesn't strike me as particularly strange. You can't take all the risk out of climbing, strange things happen.

I'm curious why all the focus on the biner? May well be the biner was fine and there's actually a problem with the design of the hanger. After all, hangers shouldn't be breaking biners, should they?