Anyone recognize this vintage gear?

This appears to be some sort of early version of a screamer…it came in a bin with a bunch of gear from the early 70’s.  The curious part is that it consists of 7 rows of 1” webbing 32” long, or about 18 feet total.  I wasn’t able to find anything similar in my internet search…anyone know what brand this is or who made it?

Can't tell from the picture - How long is it from one end of the rows to the other? Long enough, it could be a manufactured swami belt?  

The length of the sewn portion is 32” but there’s a single webbing end 14” long on each end.  I assumed it was a screamer because it has just a few threads holding each webbing cross layer together, but now that you mention it, a swami belt is likely what it is.  Each end has 3 sewn loops and it’s size and length of the webbing ends seem perfect for use as a swami belt.  Thanks!

Yes; absolutely a swami! Cross the two long ends back and forth through all of the webbing loops at the ends of the main belt, then tie together with a Frost knot/water knot/etc. I think that JRat briefly had a similar design with a single long end that, after wrapping, secured at a buckle.

Very cool find. Stephane (?sp) at the Nuts Museum might know who made it - he would certainly be intrigued and try and find out. 

Def a swami or chest harness. Compare these pix from the old Salewa Sticht plate instructions

Swami belt!

Thanks for the response! Contacting Stephane at the Nut Museum is a good idea, I’ll do that. The box of gear came with a few old bongs, hexes, nuts, and a tube chock. The tube chock has ‘Tony Yaniro’ scratched on the bottom… did a search for the name and found that there was a pro climber Tony Yaniro in the late 70’s. Not sure if it’s the same one, but still cool.  The hexes I recognize are early 70’s Chouinard.

Tony was a leading climber in the late 1970s and well in to the 1990s. Establishing many classic hard routes around the west. Grand Illusion is one. He was quite active when the City of Rock was one of "the" destinations in the 1990s. I have not seen Tony in sometime, since he moved from Idaho. I think he is in Arizona or California these days.

The swami belt look more to be home made than commercially made. The rest of the gear is late 1970s.

The Yaniro piece is def. a find.  Except for the swami (or chest harness, if it has shouder loops), the rest of those photos basically WERE my rack in the mid-1970s.

Those aluminum bongs actually worked better than 5-1/2" to 6" tube chocks; they had a more useful taper and we tied 1" webbing through the lightening holes.

Mack Johnson wrote:

Except for the swami (or chest harness, if it has shouder loops)

Were chest harnesses in common use in the 70’s?  The point was to increase comfort/safety in combo with a swami?

Jon Schwinger wrote:

Were chest harnesses in common use in the 70’s?  The point was to increase comfort/safety in combo with a swami?

Still just about in Europe - particularly in the German-speaking and Slavik countries - but not in the US [if they ever were]. In the course of four visits in the 1970s the only American climber I ever saw wearing one was Fritz Wiessner who, having grown up and climbed in Saxony in the 1920s, would have been completely familiar with the chest tie-in common at the time - which, before the development of harnesses of any kind, would have been achieved using the rope. Chest harnesses were originally used on their own, and were considered superior to the simple waist tie-in used otherwise. As the drawbacks of dangling in one for any length of time became better understood, and climbers elsewhere were starting to use the first sit-harnesses, separate legloops were increasingly added to make the whole procedure less uncomfortable and more strangle-proof; these can just be seen in the images posted above by 'wivanoff'. Of course, as you perhaps suggest, they have been found by some aid-climbers to be a useful supplement to the standard sit-harness - particularly to reduce back-strain crossing horizontal roofs - and are thus sometimes incorporated into modern aid racking double bandoliers. However - in the case of the particular item in question I'd say that at 32" it would have been a bit short as a chest harness for most adults; a swami for somebody with a 34" waist seems more likely.

That tube chock looks like an early one; the later models had a sort of rounded 'bite' taken out of each end at the top to make them more stable. And I agree with Mack J above; large slung bongs were often more useful!

Wow, hexes, tube chocks, tied-off bongs - I wish I had had that sort of modern gear when I started.