How To Use A Nut Tool Climbing

LittleHammer will improve your efficient upwards movement when cleaning a pitch, especially dealing with RP’s and other micro nuts that are hard to dislodge — being too small to strike accurately. All the tools in this review have a built-in clip-in point except for the Camp USA Nut Tool. Having a clip-in point is convenient and provides an ounce or so of weight savings since you don’t need an additional carabiner to attach the tool to your harness. Of the tools we tested, the BD Wiregate Nut Tool has the largest clip-in point, making it the easiest to attach it to or remove from your harness. The Metolius Torque and Feather have smaller gates on their built-in biners, making them more finicky. The Wild Country Pro Key’s attachment point has a slightly larger gate than the Metolius.

All suggestions here are for placement concerning removal NOT safety ,direction of pull or anything else. Also, there is no substitute for experience or an experienced teacher, in person, on the wall. “Pinch” the hook against the wall with the end of your hammer or nut tool. • A stopper makes as much surface contact with the rock as possible. If barely touching, it is more likely to get fixed after you bounce test it. For example, on The Great Roof on The Nose, stoppers get stuck all the time because people don’t use the optimal size.

Best Locking Carabiners

Once you get over the initial terror of cam hooks, they are your best friend. They help you move quickly and are sometimes the only hammerless placement for a pin scar. The key with cam hooking is to practice a lot on the ground.

The Black Diamond Wiregate Nut Tool has by far the largest hook, giving it a leg up when it comes to grabbing and a little mechanical advantage for levering and prying. The Metolius tools both have a shorter notched hook, while the WC Pro Key and the Camp USA tool have a more rounded shape that doesn’t snag onto things as well. These devices are light, compact, and can save your butt.

Small Nuts For Free Climbing

One way to lessen this force is by extending the gear, meaning clipping a sling or quickdraw between the pro and the rope to extend the distance between them. There are many other reasons to extend gear that are beyond the scope of this article, so make sure to get proper instruction. British climbers in the 1950s and 1960s were the first to use nuts as climbing protection. In addition to using pitons, they picked up machine nuts from the side of railway tracks, climbed with them in their pockets, and used them as artificial chocks. This developed to the point where they drilled the thread from the middle, threaded them with slings, and used them in cracks.

Slot the Tricam like you would a nut, finding which position fits most securely. Here, we show the fulcrum against the more prominent side of the constriction ; the rails are against the other side of the crack, with more surface contact against the gentler angle. Place it so the sling points in the direction of a fall, usually down and slightly out. Finally, give the sling a sharp tug to set the piece. Not the best climbing nut tools in any one categry, but still worth a look.

Most nuts are best backed out of cracks either by pushing on the wires or using a nut tool to “poke” it backward. You can yank the cable upwards but this is hard on the cables of all nuts particularly offset models which can kink after doing this repeatedly. They’ve taken a classic curved nut, slightly increased the curve and taper, and added grooves/ribs onto the main face for better “bite”.

The Best Climbing Nut Tools 2021

But some figure 8 devices are designed for belaying as well. Nearly the same can be said for the DMM Alloy Offsets and BD Offset Stoppers. We applaud all of these models for their overall versatility and for being quite functional in either direction. Unfortunately, as much as we love the DMM Peenuts, they offer no real secondary options. The Metolius Curve Nut, with its double-curved design, provides three points of contact on either side regardless of orientation and is the best.

Never set nuts or other protection behind flakes and blocks or in rock that would disintegrate under a load. If you fall, you don’t want your pro pulling off chunks of rock that could hit you. If you’re standing on small footholds and hanging on with one arm so you need to get a nut in fast. Go for the quick and easy placement rather than a more complicated and creative one. Look for a nut placement, recognize a good one, and then slot your nut. A large nut is usually more secure than a small one or a micro-nut.

Stoppers can take a long time to clean, especially if you bounce test them hard. When I climb The Nose, I usually place fewer than five stoppers and have climbed the route placing just one. 1) True, they are more expensive, but for free climbing you shouldn’t be buying a whole set. Just get the largest 3 sizes of DMM offset brassies (definitely get the offsets, don’t mess with the IMPs).

Even when your actual gear placement is perfect in every other way, if the rock you’re putting the piece into is bad, the placement is bad. The force of falling onto a piece of gear could cause the rock to detach from the wall. Rachele emphasizes to check rock quality on a macro and micro level before slotting your pro. Macro means looking at the whole feature, whether it’s the size of a toaster oven or a coffee table, to see if it’s detached or loose. Micro means looking at the area immediately around the placement for crumbly or fractured rock.

However, if you get one irretrievably stuck, you’ll be losing out on a good chunk of change in equipment costs. Sometimes freeing a stuck cam is a simple task, like when a cam has walked back into a crack and hasn’t become over-cammed, just unreachable. In this case, you just need a tool that’s long enough to reach the cam triggers and pull the cam out. Tape and a long stick are sometimes necessary for this operation. The tools in this review are marginally different lengths; we’re talking about differences in length of a quarter of an inch at best. All of these nut tools fall within a fairly small price range.

What you’re looking for is a crack that you can just fit the hex into. Place the hex so that it has opposite sides making contact with either side of the crack, with the sling coming out diagonally from the bottom. Look for constrictions and treat them just like a large nut. As with nuts, give the hex a gentle tug to seat it in position, then extend it with a quickdraw. Extremely thin design allows you to get into even the tiniest cracks. I have mine clipped to a full sized BD Neutrino biner, less likely to fumble then a mini biner but still the chance to drop it is there.

Follow a multi-pitch route to see how the leader places gear, inspecting the placement as you take it out. If you have time, try to re-place it in the same spot the leader did. This will build confidence and a good “lead head,” meaning your ability to deal with fear and the mental challenge of climbing above gear. It would handle cams that are out of reach with the conventional tools. Great feedback, I had no idea about the DMM Nutter tool.