WC Helium Friends w/ Extendable Slings and Thumb Loop?

I was climbing today at a local crag in BCC, I look over and see this climber with a set of Helium Cams that had extendable slings on a thumb loop. Probably in town for the OR Show. He told me they will be producing them in October sometime.

I didn't get a picture but I had a chance to handle them. The slings were sweet. Apparently, the dyneema is lined with Spectra Cord. It didn't have the plastic piece to protect the sling like you see in the DMM line.

Anybody else hear anything or see anything about this? The climber claimed he had been climbing on them for a year.

I'm sorry, but.....

Well, I didnt get pictures. All I can say is that they look this but on the WC Helium Cams.

Christopher Allan wrote:Dyneema and Spectra are the same thing... en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ult… But still, that sounds sick!

I wonder if he means that the Dyneema is lined with Nylon to give it the coloring since you can't dye Dyneema/Spectra.

Im just repeating what the guy told me. He told me that there was spectra cord (like an actual piece of cordage) inside the sling.

since when do dragons have thumb loops?

Those could be the old prototype dragons

;)

Matt.Zia wrote: Didn't BD try to do an extendable sling on the C4's a while back but found the sling had a tendency to deform the thumb loop because of the small area the force of a fall would be concentrated on? .

Fixing the BD design to have an extendible loop is easy... Increase the diameter of the stem wire. BD is stuck with the non-extendible sling because the thumb loop is a relatively small diameter wire with both ends terminated in the head (which means there's no swage at the thumb loop, and reduced weight). Downside to this is the smaller wire will cut an extendable loop at loads lower than they'd like to rate the gear, hence no extendable loops on C4's. Simple answer is increasing the diameter of the stem wire, but that means more weight on an already heavy design, so it's not going to happen.