Cinch failed to engage?

This weekend my wife was leading in the gym, fell near the last bolt ~45 feet up and soft decked.

 It seems like her belayers Revo didn’t lock up but eventually caught or her belayer managed to arrest the fall without assistance from the autolocking mechanism and got slammed up into the first bolt. Climber was completely unscathed (landed softly on her back) but belayer sustained minor injuries from the collision with the wall.

I’m completely unfamiliar with the Revo so not sure if this is a known issue, a freak occurrence or belayer error, though for what it’s worth they are highly experienced and have many hours under their belt using their Revo.

Wondering if anyone more familiar with the device has any insight.

Correction- it was actually a cinch, not a revo. 

First thing I would want to know is how much the belayer tried to resist the rope with their own hand. Sounds like you understand the basics of the Revo, obviously slowing the rope down can actually prevent the mechanism from engaging, due to lack of rope speed. That concern shouldn’t be an issue considering you mention the belayer was experienced w/ revo… but who knows how people react to an unexpected fall, even in a sterile gym setting.

Tangentially related, I used to short fix with the revo but doing pendulums was very difficult as slowly feeding rope under load is difficult - also, I could always lock the device but the device would also unlock if I tried to “lock down” the rope, as I would with an atc. Perhaps the belayer tried to lock the rope down, atc style, and inadvertently defeated the lockup of the revo?

From what you've posted it sounds like it's not a case of the Revo failing to engage, but yet another case of the Revo not engaging because it was not designed to do so in that circumstance.

People who use the Wild Country Revo expecting it to be an assisted braking belay device like the Grigri, Neox, Birdie, Lifeguard, Click-Up, Jul2, ATC Pilot, Smart, etc. will be in for an unpleasant surprise. When used properly the Revo will not lock up when catching lead falls or TR falls.

It locks up once the wheel spins at 4m/s or faster. So unless you belay with excessive amounts of slack between your brake hand and your belay device the Revo will not lock up when your climber falls.

I bought the Revo when it came out and posted my findings here: mountainproject.com/forum/t…

I tested out the Revo again in the gym. 

This time the focus was on catching lead falls.

As expected the Revo never locked up when catching any lead fall while belaying normally.

The only way we got the Revo to lock up to catch a lead fall was when the belayer had an excessive amount of slack between their brake hand and the belay device. 

Thanks for the replies yall.

 I still haven’t had a chance to talk to the belayer but on talking further with my wife I realized the device in question was in fact a Cinch, not a Revo. Sorry for the confusion, I’ve edited the title.

I did some googling and found an old thread on here that gave me the impression this is a little too common of an occurrence with the cinch for my liking.

Didn’t come away with any certainty as to whether these incidents were the result of device failure or belayer error but at the end of the day if a device is so finicky that user error is common that’s not a device I’m comfortable with- I’m trying to stack the odds in favor of safety as much as I can.

Still curious if anyone has any insight  or opinions on the issue though.

The Cinch and Vergo both have no spring, so squeezing the device with your thumb on the plate instead of the proper place at the pivot hole can defeat the device. That's a bad habit that is pretty obvious. 

Device orientation matters: A less obvious failure mode happens if you have a habit of holding the device horizontally between thumb and index finger at the pivot, but don't pay attention to keep the exit path of the rope pointed down, away from the first bolt. I have found that the combination of a low first bolt and turning the left side of the belayer's body (so that the rope exits straight toward that bolt) allows the rope to zip thru the device. A poor brake hand grip added to that will lead to a drop. Once the rope is moving fast, it seems to have less drag over the pin, and that drag is all that is left to make the plate rotate and grab the rope if the brake hand is AWOL.  

Did the belayer get rope burns on either the climber's strand or the brake hand?

edit to add: is the pin itself worn down? That matters, too. Post a photo. 

Ok, let's make sure that Cinch was being used correctly 

Here's link to YouTube youtu.be/lkOVssfihn0?si=QhB…;

Something to notice - climber's end comes out at the bottom, opposite to camming or geometry assisted braking devices

Glad that your wife and her belayer are OK. Whenever I read these posts, I have to wonder why people don’t just use a Grigri. Obviously it is not without failure modes, but it has a pretty damn good track record.

rock climbing wrote:

To me the Cinch never inspired too much confidence.
i was at the gym in the video when a friend threw his Cinch in the trash because he said it did not engage. It was his primary belay device for while and experienced with it. He said that it just did not engage.

Didn’t the cinch become vergo because issues like that? 

Difficult to say why your friend's Cinch did not engage. IF rope comes out on the top, if Cinch were loaded like GrGri, it might not engage. Two weeks ago I, surprisingly, saw Cinch being used in my gym, it was NOT LOADED correctly. I tried to engage belayer, but was shut down - they believed that the usage of device was correct. 

As to why someone would prefer Trango Vergo to GG - because it is much easier to lead belay with. 

amarius wrote:

As to why someone would prefer Trango Vergo to GG - because it is much easier to lead belay with. 

I don't mean this as a criticism against you personally, but I honestly don't understand why a Grigri would be hard to use. My wife who has tiny hands does just fine with it. And as for lefties, can't they learn to belay ambidextrously? Personally, I can belay left-handed with an ATC (sometimes comes in handy on multipitch and/or when belaying off the harness from above).

Alex C wrote:

I don't mean this as a criticism against you personally, but I honestly don't understand why a Grigri would be hard to use. My wife who has tiny hands does just fine with it. And as for lefties, can't they learn to belay ambidextrously? Personally, I can belay left-handed with an ATC (sometimes comes in handy on multipitch and/or when belaying off the harness from above).

It is not that GG is hard to use, it is that Vergo is easier. Feeding slack quickly is more ergonomic on shoulders, much faster that GG - belay may be kept tight for those low bolts, and then slack fed lightning fast. I am not the only one using it - looking around my gym, I see quite a few Vergos, and people using them are belaying and catching falls on relatively hard climbs - this disclaimer is to prevent the typical "gumby can't use GG" knee jerk replies.

amarius wrote:

Ok, let's make sure that Cinch was being used correctly 

Here's link to YouTube youtu.be/lkOVssfihn0?si=QhB…;

Something to notice - climber's end comes out at the bottom, opposite to camming or geometry assisted braking devices

There's more to it...

Malcolm Daly, former owner of Trango invented the Cinch.

He intended it to be used in the same orientation as other mechanical assisted braking belay devices, such as the Grigri. In the case of the Cinch the release handle is on the right hand side instead of the left hand side. If you look at the text that is on the Cinch it is only right side up when the Cinch is used the way Malcolm Daly intended and instructed - videos of him instructing how to use the Cinch have long been scrubbed off of the internet, more on this later...

The Cinch was my go to belay device for a few years whenever I wanted a belay device with assisted braking functionality.

One of the big advantages of the Cinch was how easily and smoothly one could pay out slack, and that was mostly due to the design of the device having the rope travel in an almost straight line through the device. But that advantage was a double edged sword. It was not unheard of to have "close calls" when lead belaying with the Cinch. The such smooth and easy travel due to the rope going in an almost straight line through the device meant that the margin of error was very thin, unlike the Grigri which, for better or for worse, has a very robust margin of error. Most of the time those close calls just resulted in climbers falling farther than they should have before their fall was arrested.

Around the very early 2010s the ownership of Trango changed.

It looks like the new owners weren't willing to accept the number of "close calls" the Cinch had and decided to do something about it. That something was to change the instructions of how the Cinch is to be used; henceforth, the Cinch was to be used upside down. In the youtube video that you posted a link to there are 2 people who point out the upside down/backwards orientation. One of them was me under a handle for which I have long forgotten my password.

I wonder if people using the Cinch as per the new instructions were ever perplexed as to why all the writing on the device was upside down...

Eventually the Cinch was discontinued and replaced with the Vergo. 

The Vergo is an updated Cinch, meant from the very beginning to be used in the upside down orientation that was communicated for the Cinch in its latter years. Trango boasted about having a person with a Ph.D in ergonomics design the Vergo, and I will give them credit for that. In handling the Vergo it feels obvious that it is a superior design in terms of ergonomics compared to the Cinch.

nowhere wrote:

Thanks for the replies yall.

 I still haven’t had a chance to talk to the belayer but on talking further with my wife I realized the device in question was in fact a Cinch, not a Revo. Sorry for the confusion, I’ve edited the title.

I did some googling and found an old thread on here that gave me the impression this is a little too common of an occurrence with the cinch for my liking.

Didn’t come away with any certainty as to whether these incidents were the result of device failure or belayer error but at the end of the day if a device is so finicky that user error is common that’s not a device I’m comfortable with- I’m trying to stack the odds in favor of safety as much as I can.

Still curious if anyone has any insight  or opinions on the issue though.

The Cinch, eh?

Well... then that begs the question: how were they using it? 

Were they using it the way it was originally designed to be used? Or were they using it in the orientation which was instructed later: upside down

Khoi wrote:

There's more to it...

Thanks for sharing!

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimbingGear/comments/1iphnyi/i_cannot_find_info_on_this_recall_why_did_my_gym/
I can't find reference to the recal but touchstone gyms seem to think there was one

I used a cinch since the first version came out and then replaced it with a Vergo when that came out. I’m very familiar with my personal usage method for the Cinch, but I can’t say what the “correct” method is. For myself, feeding slack required moving the plate forward with the palm of my brake hand with a very light grip on the rope with just fingers. The key was to understand that “locking off” required pulling up with the non brake hand to engage the auto locking mechanism while simultaneously releasing the brake hand’s pressure from the plate. In practice with a fall it’s all happening very quickly but if you consistently “lock off” by moving the brake hand off the plate (and to its traditional position) and pulling the left up you will have low potential for a failure during the movement that allows you to feed slack. Without this technique the device can “hang” which based on my memory of using the device was a higher risk of a failure mode.

My guess is that you had a combo of a belayer standing too far from the wall with too much slack at the time of the fall and possibly a sloppy technique for using the cinch that kept the device in its open position until the fall jostled their hand away from the device and allowed it to lock up again. Since so much rope was running through the device at a high speed the device was unable to fully arrest the descent but the friction allowed a soft landing.

I recently had a close call while lowering with the Vergo when anchor biners unexpectedly came into contact with the device while lowering and forced it open. Luckily the device was able to lock up again but it happened so fast I could not do anything about it.

I know the Cinch also has a piece that wears out over time so it’s possible that with a very very used Cinch the rope friction isn’t quite what it should be.  Another consideration is that when I used the Cinch it “polished” my rope from compressing it repeatedly (over the round metal piece noted above) and the rope became very slippery and was much harder to lock off with an ATC and I even soft decked once (outside) when my belayer could not lock off on a fall.

So those would be some additional considerations in addition to possibly incorrect technique.

When some of the initial reports about Cinch drops came out, followed by a death at the Darkside, I was a daily Cinch user.

I tried like hell to recreate the scenario where it drops someone. I was never quite successful in this, though I did find some angles that could be concerning. Even worse, if I fully wrenched on the handle it was at such an impractical angle that I am sure that’s not the failure mode.

Climbers talk big about redundant systems. Two or three pieces between you and the hospital. Inspecting your gear and removing anything suspicious. “Is your life worth the price of …?”

With ideas like this, how could I possibly continue using it, even though it was always a great device to me. With no exact thing to avoid, but numerous failures online, it started feeling a bit too much like Russian Roulette. I binned the Cinch and went back to the GriGri.

I haven’t used one in years. I’ll let you belay me on TR with one. When it’s my lead, I’m happy to loan you my Neox or ATC when we’re climbing together. 

The cinch issue appears several times in the MP forum threads: e.g. 

https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/108340840/belay-accident-with-trango-cinch

https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/108385550/trango-cinch-use 

https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/107088236/how-safe-is-the-cinch?page=2#ForumMessage-107092618

From the German Alpine Club when they started being alarmed about Cinch accidents:

https://issuu.com/sensit/docs/panorama_3-2010.html around page 68

It was a long time ago, so my memory is fuzzy. I think the German Alpine club saw a large percent of belay failures with the Cinch, which was used by a small, single-digit number percent of climbers. Eventually, after unsatisfactory interactions with the manufacturer, the DAV took the unusual (has not been done before or since) step of providing instructions on Cinch use that differed from the manufacturer's instructions. It's possible that the European equivalent of the US CPSC considered banning the sale of the device (very fuzzy recollection)?

dave custer wrote:

From the German Alpine Club when they started being alarmed about Cinch accidents:

https://issuu.com/sensit/docs/panorama_3-2010.html around page 68

It was a long time ago, so my memory is fuzzy. I think the German Alpine club saw a large percent of belay failures with the Cinch, which was used by a small, single-digit number percent of climbers. Eventually, after unsatisfactory interactions with the manufacturer, the DAV took the unusual (has not been done before or since) step of providing instructions on Cinch use that differed from the manufacturer's instructions. It's possible that the European equivalent of the US CPSC considered banning the sale of the device (very fuzzy recollection)?

The recommended instructions appear to be identical to Trango Vergo official usage instructions.