While we announced the largest Camalot in climbing history on April 1, 2020 - and wanted to mislead you with it - today we are presenting the Camalots in sizes 7 and 8 by Black Diamond, which were launched a few days ago.
In the past, fear drove you to your bones when you stared into the gaping throat of a crack that, due to its size, could hardly be secured or not at all. Black Diamond finally has a remedy for this fear. Two newly launched Camalots of sizes # 7 and # 8 are waiting to tame these monster tears. The Black Diamond Camalots now range in size from 0.3 to 8.
Dream big
For the development engineers at Black Diamond, a long-cherished dream has finally come true.
"We wanted to offer climbers fully certified Camalots of this size," said Jeremy Steck, senior development engineer for the project. "We also wanted to put Camalots of this size through their paces both in product development and field tests as well as in production quality measures."
“However, developing certified Camalots of this size presented us with a number of major challenges. Simply 'enlarging' our current Camalot C4s has not proven to be as easy as originally thought. "
"When we recently revised the C4s, I was playing around with a size 7 Camalot," says Steck. "Believing that it would be fairly straightforward, I simply scaled up a # 6 and built a few prototypes without doing any real simulations or strength calculations."
To the surprise of Steck, these first prototypes failed under a load of less than 5kN.
"It turned out that a Camalot of this size was slightly different," says Steck. "It turned out that it was a matter of understanding and mastering the bending of the clamping segments."
Finding the solution to the kink problem took quite a while, according to Steck. The obvious solution, just to make the clamp segments thicker, was not practical, as the Camalots would quickly reach a weight that would be too heavy for climbers.
"I had to think about the basics and do a little bit of things like eigenvalue calculations," says Steck. "After many hours of FEA simulations, different prototypes, countless laboratory tests, several scary field tests and" again from the beginning ", we developed a design that we could proudly include in our proven C4 Camalot line.
"I'm sure that all trad climbers have come to a point in their climbing career where they pissed their pants and wished for a giant Camalot," adds Steck.
The new Camalots 7 & 8 briefly explained
- Innovative locking function saves space on the material loop
- Revised sling for better distinguishability on the material loop
- Dual axis design for the greatest possible scope ever
- C-loop center bar with continuous cable for maximum strength and flexibility
- Color coded for easy distinction
- LiteWire Rackpack for easy organization on the material loop (see "Carabiner")
That might interest you
https://www.lacrux.com/klettern/je-groesser-desto-stabiler-camalots-im-sicherheitstest
+ + +
Credits: Image and text Black Diamond