Small DMM Nuts?

I have DMM Walnuts #1-11 and DMM Offsets 7-11, and was thinking about some smaller passive pro

I generally climb in New England, but one day hope to travel to climb again (e.g. RR, Squamish) 

Sticking with DMM, the Micro-Walnuts and Peanuts don't seem as popular as the Brass IMPs and Brass Offsets

Not sure how much I would use/trust the smallest ones (5kn and below), but that still leaves a bunch of options (Brass Offsets > #2, and the larger IMPs)

I have read the threads on similar subjects, but still not 100% sure what to do.  If I could buy singles it would be easier, but I have a hard time rationalizing buying both the full set of Brass Offsets and the IMPs, but not sure which is the better options for me

Pretty sure you can buy the brass in singles. The below #4 brass are basically aid pieces. I’d definitely get the top 3-4 sizes though over the peanuts. I have both and the brass offsets are great in granite and and hard sandstone like the nrg 

I have a rack of the the Peenuts and I would recommend them. They might not have as much bite as the brass nuts, but they're still a great piece. 

Josh Rappoport wrote:

I have DMM Walnuts #1-11 and DMM Offsets 7-11, and was thinking about some smaller passive pro

I generally climb in New England, but one day hope to travel to climb again (e.g. RR, Squamish) 

Sticking with DMM, the Micro-Walnuts and Peanuts don't seem as popular as the Brass IMPs and Brass Offsets

Not sure how much I would use/trust the smallest ones (5kn and below), but that still leaves a bunch of options (Brass Offsets > #2, and the larger IMPs)

I have read the threads on similar subjects, but still not 100% sure what to do.  If I could buy singles it would be easier, but I have a hard time rationalizing buying both the full set of Brass Offsets and the IMPs, but not sure which is the better options for me

If you want to buy a complete set of brassies, the IMP #3,#4,#5 will overlap the sizes of your Wallnuts #1,#2,#3. If you buy the DMM offsets (#0-#6), their sizes fit perfectly below the sizes of your DMM offsets (ever wonder why your offsets are numbered #7-#11?).

I have used both peenuts and DMM brass offsets. I prefer the brassies (even though they can be more troublesome to clean, which means I only place them when an offset shape is actually an advantage over my other small straight-sided nuts).

Patrick nailed it.  I climb with 1-6 wallnuts and the alloy offsets.  

If I know I need micros I have the offset brassies (I think I bring down to a 3?  And then I have two black diamond straight sides micros that are just below my purple #1 wallnut.  

Around 5-7 true micro nuts should cover your bases nicely.   Depending where you climb they can be required or just a "nice to have sometimes" piece. 

Edit to add: people will debate offset vs regular micros.  I like having both as I want a perfect fit when the gear is that small.   An offset brassie with only the two corners touching the crack doesn't inspire confidence. 

Thanks!

I think I will go ahead and get the DMM brass offsets as a start

Josh Rappoport wrote:

Thanks!

I think I will go ahead and get the DMM brass offsets as a start

I don’t think you will be disappointed. Go all the way down to the smallest. 2-3kn > 0 and can take a small fall for sure maybe more. 

NickMartel wrote:

I don’t think you will be disappointed. Go all the way down to the smallest. 2-3kn > 0 and can take a small fall for sure maybe more. 

Be careful with such a statement. The "standard UIAA climber" weighs 80kg  (176lbs) when they test falling on ropes. This is equivalent to 0.8kN. So with such a weight just gently sitting down and hanging on the rope on a piece placed above you, there will be a load of 0.8 x 1.7 = 1.4kN on the top piece. There's not a lot of margin to the "limit" of 2kN for the smallest brassie (and other small nuts rated as aid gear). As far as I know, any pro rated for 4kN or higher is considered lead gear and all gear rated 2kN is aid. For some odd reason, there seem to be almost no gear rated at 3kN, so maybe that is where the "grey area" is. Maybe manufacturers don't really care for testing at 3kN as anything less than 4kN is forced to be classified as aid gear anyway. Most likely, the required minimum strength for aid gear is 2kN so that's what they slap onto their product (just my speculation). 

So if you do occasionally use 2kN nuts when leading, maybe focus really hard on placing two and try some equalization scheme. 

* The factor x 1.7 is a rough estimate of what effect friction between the rope and the top biner has. With no friction at all (or a Revolver biner?), the factor would be x 2. 

** For some "real" falls (in a gym), Petzl did some testing and found that a fall factor of 0.3 gave a force on the upper piece of pro as 4kN. With a little rope drag having trad gear in a non-straight line, this number is going to be higher. ( Petzl fall test ).

I have em all, prefer the brassies every time!

Patrik wrote:

So if you do occasionally use 2kN nuts when leading, maybe focus really hard on placing two and try some equalization scheme. 

I remember climbing with Howard Doyle (not a small guy). He would hang out on a stupidly hard faces and place small brass nuts (RPs). He would get as many as he felt necessary to protect him and then equalize them all. Most climbs that people would consider as R rated, Howard would sew up.

Patrik wrote:

As far as I know, any pro rated for 4kN or higher is considered lead gear and all gear rated 2kN is aid.

I did not know this. Is this because the rope is supposedly always weighted during aid?  

Are any other brands of nuts good? DMM is clearly the fan favorite, but are they that much better than BD or Metolius? 

Mike S wrote:

Are any other brands of nuts good? DMM is clearly the fan favorite, but are they that much better than BD or Metolius? 

I think the ability to place (and extend) them is more important than the brand. Sure, certain nuts will fit better or "bite" better, but if you don't place them well...

Mike S wrote:

Are any other brands of nuts good? DMM is clearly the fan favorite, but are they that much better than BD or Metolius? 

I have DMM offset micros on my rack. I have no trouble adapting to the straight BD micro (which is more like a DMM IMP). The BD offset micro looks similar enough to the DMM that I would have no problem with those. I cannot find the offset micros on the BD website, so maybe no longer in production? Metolius micros on the other hand is a very different beast. Their curve shape is very different, and I would have serious problems finding any placements with large surface area contact. Maybe it is specialty gear for pin scars? The areas I climb don't have much pin scars, so my eye is not tuned to pin scar placements.

Is anyone really not going to place a nut because it’s rated 2kn?   So you would rather have nothing rather than something?   I place micro nuts all the time, it might not hold a fall but it also just might hold a fall.  I never understood the mentality of not using lower rated gear because it might not hold a fall.  If that is the only option why wouldn’t you place it?

Mike S wrote:

I did not know this. Is this because the rope is supposedly always weighted during aid?  

It is because in aid climbing as long as it can hold your weight you can make upward progress on that piece. Basically the manufacturers are saying it can hold body weight but not a fall.

 I had the smallest DMM offset (#0) hold a 4’ fall while aiding when a hook above broke off the edge it was on. So first it took a light/medium bounce test, Then me @225# (almost 1kn) hanging on it, then a 4’ fall. The wire ended up a bit bent where the wire comes out the bottom of the nut just below the silver brazing but none of the threads of the wire broke.

I am not saying run it out above a 2kn wire, but a 2kn piece is a lot better than nothing. Especially if you are (unlike me) on the lighter side of things. 

Kevin Mokracek wrote:

Is anyone really not going to place a nut because it’s rated 2kn?   So you would rather have nothing rather than something?   I place micro nuts all the time, it might not hold a fall but it also just might hold a fall.  I never understood the mentality of not using lower rated gear because it might not hold a fall.  If that is the only option why wouldn’t you place it

If the act of placing a 2kn nut increases your chances of falling on it, then it might not be worth it if there's only a small chance it will actually hold. But yeah, I'll place them if I can. 

I like the Peenuts, and rack a set pretty much anytime I bring a set of nuts. 

Kevin Mokracek wrote:

Is anyone really not going to place a nut because it’s rated 2kn?   So you would rather have nothing rather than something?   I place micro nuts all the time, it might not hold a fall but it also just might hold a fall.  I never understood the mentality of not using lower rated gear because it might not hold a fall.  If that is the only option why wouldn’t you place it?

For me, it depends.

I tend to be of the opinion that if I'm dubious about a placement actually being able to hold a fall, I'd rather not place it. Exception to that would be say to protect a short (1-2 moves) sequence where I'm pretty sure I'll get better gear after. Another one may be leaving a belay before putting any actual piece of gear in - even a shit piece would still help prevent FF2, so I'm happy putting in anything. But other than that, my thinking is that it allows me to honestly assess where I am in my climb. If I check at the last piece, or even consider the one before that, it's easier to decide if I'm still okay with the level of commitment this involves, or if I need to think about some way to bail/alternatives. As far as I am concerned, doesn't matter if I'm dubious because the placement is shit or because the gear is rated 2kN. But then I don't specialize in R/x rated climbs, I don't lead 5.12 on gear, so maybe that'll change... But for now.

Kevin Mokracek wrote:

Is anyone really not going to place a nut because it’s rated 2kn?   So you would rather have nothing rather than something?   I place micro nuts all the time, it might not hold a fall but it also just might hold a fall.  I never understood the mentality of not using lower rated gear because it might not hold a fall.  If that is the only option why wouldn’t you place it?

I think it is too easy to develop an unfounded (possibly subconscious) trust in those little things. Even tho you have placed 2kN nuts a hundred times and you have progressed in placing them better and better, it has no meaning as to how many would have actually held a fall. Maybe 0 of them would have actually worked. 

The mentality of not using lower rated gear is because they are actually not rated to hold any kind of fall. If you romp up an offwidth and run out of big gear, would you squeeze in your nalgene bottle, clip it and call it good? Yes, these little 2kN nuts look like climbing gear, they smell like climbing gear, and they cost like climbing gear, but they are still not lead climbing gear. I am surprised and disappointed that both BD and DMM (and maybe other companies as well) sell complete sets of nuts where the smallest ones are not rated for lead climbing. How many climbers really read the details of the user manual? Even if they do read the text, how many know the difference in aid vs lead climbing when it comes to forces? How many care to do their homework to try to figure out the difference?

It all comes down to the dreaded factor-0 fall. If you take a "mini-whipper" on a piece at your waist (or just within reach above you), how much force will there be on this piece of gear? If we start from the easiest case: We clip in our harness to the piece and gently hang on it (standard aid scenario), the force on the gear will be our body weight. Assuming an 80kg dude (or dudette) (which is 176lbs), the force is 0.8kN (there's 10N to 1kg). Being one step braver, we ask for TAKE! and hangdog on the top piece instead of clipping in directly. Neglecting any kind of friction in the system, the belayer must hold down with a force equal to the weight of the climber (0.8kN). The result is that the top piece now must hold both the climber and the belayer's forces which adds up to 1.6kN ( 2 x 0.8kN). The next step is a little harder to explain. Instead of nicely and gently sitting down on the gear and hangdog, the climber just abruptly lets go and take a real fall. Intuitively, we feel like it would result in a bigger force and this is correct. But how much bigger? Again, if we neglect friction and assume a completely static belay, the resulting maximum force on the top piece will actually be 4x the climber's body weight, which is 3.2kN. Taking friction between the rope and top biner into account, both the 2x and the 4x cases will see a lower force on the top gear. A tiny bit of "dynamic" in the belayer and the climber's body being a squishy bag of water instead of a solid piece of metal will also reduce this theoretical max force. For those seriously interested, you can play around with a fall force calculator (where they include friction in the model, but not dynamics in the belay). For any kind of realistic numbers you plug in here, the force on the top piece of gear will always be higher than 2kN even for factor-0 falls. So, 2kN gear is not for lead climbing as it cannot even hold a factor-0 fall.

So, why do I still have 2kN nuts on my rack? When I need to place them, my mind goes into "special care" mode. If it is early on a pitch (where there is very little rope out to reduce forces), I seriously consider backing off. If I can get two or three of those placements, I always do that and use sliding-X or clove both with a sling and clip in the middle in an attempt to share the load. If the rock in any way interfere with the cable of the nut (for example a horizontal placement), I don't even bother placing it (as the cable is actually the limit of its strength). If I only see micronut placements for a long stretch or just above a ledge, I treat it as an unprotectable climb. If bailing off is not a valid option, but you see "real" gear above your micronut, you could consider aiding as this will only give body weight on the marginal pieces (I haven't yet been this desperate and getting to the top no matter what style has never been a goal of mine).

Like most climbers I appreciate gear talk and getting into the nerdery of forces.  Patrick's thoughts are solid. 

If you aren't aid climbing I seriously think it's less than 1 percent of not 1/10 of a percent of climbers that actually need to place that small of gear. More often than not I see newer climbers putting in microgear (where they shouldn't be!!) and then possibly passing up on the bomber cam or nut placement a few feet after.   

As a newer climber I think it's super important to look at these conversations as interesting, but not really applicable.   There are seriously 0 routes I can think that I've climbed or wanted to climb where a 0,1,2, or even 3 size dmm micro nuts are REQUIRED.  

Sure maybe a high piece to take a nice TR fall instead of falling on the cam at your feet, or a oh shit piece when you passed up on a placement and are now in a thin crack with the next real piece a body length or two away.  But advertising getting a full set of micronuts for beginners is 1. A waste of money and 2. Maybe setting them up for highly risky behavior.  

I have personally witnessed partners who got new shiny micros place 2-4 in a row on a NORMALLY protected climb.  They are a last resort piece not something you should be placing regularly or looking for.  

I hope my rambling makes sense and I imagine most on this forum think similarly.  I appreciate and have my own micro gear stories (I was cruxing out above a #2 brassie or whatever) and while these are fun and romanticized in climbing it's usually because of a mistake or poor judgement.  These stories also aren't as cool when they end with "they ripped the nut and broke their leg/back and didn't climb for a year etc."