So.
Which way is correct?
This way or
this way?
Long answer short,
it doesn't matter.
Now if somebody wants to argue with you
you can send this video.
However, if you'are wondering
why my carabiner is a little broken here
or you are that person who wants to argue.
Let me entertain you.
There is a boy oh boy
that was not that easy to figure out.
What happened?
Well, the rope is still here.
The GriGri's still here.
Oh
my
God.
Now a bit of context for those who don't
understand what's the big deal about this.
This is Black Diamond Gridlock,
it's a belay carabiner.
And we have a lot of similar
carabiners already on the market,
like this one for example.
And these carabiners usually have
a little loop at the bottom,
which you clip your harness to
and it prevents the carabiner
from twisting in
some less than optimal orientation
and cross-loading it.
Now I have a bunch of these
belay carabiners and on all of them
you clip your harness to the smaller loop
while you clip your belay device
to the bigger loop.
However with Black Diamond GridLock
you will see people clipping GriGri
to the smaller loop.
So, why is that?
Well, first of all the manual is really confussing
It shows tube style device connected to the bigger loop
It shows GriGri connected to the smaller loop
And then it has a warning if you crossload the device
But it's a warning it's not a skull
It's not a big no-no
So the question is:
Is it okay to connect GriGri to the bigger loop?
So, to unravel this mystery
I thought the best is actually
to write to Black Diamond and ask them to give us recommendations
And I got the response. This is a question for Petzl
They recommended GriGri to be connected at the small loop of the carabiner
and then they sent me a link to petzl
website which kinda doesn't make any
sense i was like
there is no way petzl would put a
competitor product on their website and
talk about how to use it well i went to
that link of course there was nothing
and just in case i decided to write to
petal
and the answer was petal does not
specify if grigri should be attached to
upper or lower basket they also included
that we should be aware of pear-shaped
carabiners because they have a tendency
to rotate and become poorly positioned
which means that pear-shaped carabiners
like this one connected to grigri are
more likely to cross-load during the
laying compared to d-shaped carabiners
they kind of don't let the grigri to go
to that side that easily which i can
confirm from my own experience so good
to know but it doesn't solve our black
diamond gridlock mystery so i went back
to talk to black diamond and this time
the response was as you can see we do
not specifically recommend against a
grigri loaded into a larger loop as
there is no safety issues in doing so
so
it seems that there is no official
no no no to do this but
where is all of this confusion coming
from then well let me say that this
carabiner is really really old design i
found an article dating like 10 years
ago which pointed to an issue of doing
this where in case of the crossload the
grigri can get jammed so since i wanted
to go deeper into this story i reached
out to my friend ryan from youtube
channel how not to to help me to
investigate it here is a black diamond
gridlock screw gate carabiner and a cool
feature about this is if you put it on a
belay loop
you open that gate one more time and it
keeps it in the back of the carabiner
but ironically if you put the grigri on
there
and you lock it then if your climber
goes slack for a little bit
and then loads it
oh no
it's cross-loaded ironically
and it's actually cross-loaded pretty
badly
so we're going to test this to see how
bad it really is an interesting side
note is if you put the carabiner facing
the other way
and so the black plate is towards the
back
it actually does not get stuck in any
circumstance
few things to note if you take any other
belay carabiner
properly designed it is impossible to
make your belay device jam in this way
it always
slides out
on load and second thing even if you
manage to cross load this carabiner it
should still hold up to seven
kilonewtons of force and from my testing
i've never seen forces higher than two
kilonewtons to the blair on really
really hard falls so it's more than
three times safety ratio however if you
get your grigri jumped in here the
grigri is being twisted as it wants to
go back in its normal position so i'm
not sure if grigri is gonna like that
let's find out
[Music]
oh that's stuck some real stuck stuff
right here for science
oh
okay let's try it again
oh wow see it's separating a plate right
there
well that's not good for the gravy
[Music]
so the rope is slipping around three and
that's usually pretty common the plate
is definitely
it's looser see if we can make this fail
[Music]
what happened
well the rope is still here
the grigri's still here
oh
my
god
that's a very interesting result
oh that's gold
wow
huh you tell me this carabiner
still functions it even looks
i mean it's scraped up a little bit but
wow
so just jacks the plates apart
at seven kilonewtons if it's not
slipping at five or two and a half
oh wow
but that was the journey we just went on
so although in real life scenarios it's
really hard to generate forces anywhere
close to that however grigri started
suffering at around five kilonewtons or
maybe even less it didn't really like
that
twisting action so take this as a
warning and this mystery doesn't end
here because we received this picture
from the follower of us and he was
replying down gets a few meters down
uh
readjusts on the rope on the wall and we
hear this loud
ping and like uh he bumps down
a small piece of metal comes flying off
the wall which landed close to us so we
found it and when you got down to the
bottom you can see that the nose is
broken off in the caribbean defense even
though the nose did explode
um still functional
there's a pin and there's a gate
it's not
he didn't fall to his death so i mean he
had a backup on anyway are you still
using it
no definitely not
no
you just like shred your below loop or
something it's just like super sharp on
the inside edge how hard do you think
the load was no
he was there any slack in the system or
no not really dude weighs about
80 75 maybe kilos we were repelling it
was a dynamic rope he was rappelling on
i can imagine it could be two things i
thought initially it was probably what
you suggested
um which is
that i think so since the forces were
really low on this incident it raises a
lot of questions the first theory we had
was that maybe grigri was twisting
against that little nose and broke it
however from ryan experiments as you saw
it's probably really unlikely so another
potential cause could have been improper
loading of the carabiner on the harness
the gridlock is supposed to look like
this with the belay loop in the back of
the carabiner but if you don't put it
back there and it's not locked
it's not a problem
but if it is locked we'll find out
how much of a problem that really is
[Music]
let me make sure i see what happened
first
oh it jumped
oh
it jumped god damn it so since ryan ran
out of black diamond carabiners to break
welcome to my testing lab
where my setup is an actual harness with
very thick belay loop i'm hoping that
it's not gonna slip
through the nose like in ryan's case and
since i don't have a fancy machine to
break things i'm gonna drop weights
and for those who worry about my safety
constantly
i don't even know how to put this on
that was
2.4 kilonewtons and it slipped through
the interesting part that this gap is
super super tiny
compared to all of this belay loop maybe
this part of metal also flexes a little
bit so now i'm gonna put the thickest
part of the harness on the nose
let's see what happens
[Music]
hmm
well let's try again okay
i'm trying
something else this time
to see how this will go
i think i broke it
yep i broke the nose i felt it shot into
my
nipple
[Music]
this part is so so
sharp and your belay loop is falling
through this super sharp edge
i think i wrecked my harness a little
bit
and after analyzing the forces you can
see that the pin broke around here
around one and a half kilonewtons only
and then the peak of the force was when
the harness hit the bottom of the
carabiner so if you load this carabiner
incorrectly this little piece is not
hard to break and it leaves a very very
sharp edge which goes over your belay
loop
now the story doesn't end here
we test it on another belay device to
see what happens
[Music]
oh damn
okay 12.6 kilometers it smells like gun
powder right now
it broke
my blade of ice
that's crazy and this thing was super
strong in our belay device brake test
video
it was twerking on the
the two lobes i think
wow
all right so we broke a bunch of
carabiners and belaying devices
and i kind of had to find another
gridlock to make this outro so this is a
little future me so back to original
question is it okay to do this where the
grigri is connected to the bigger loop
well if you want a little bit safer
you can clip the carabiner other way
around
and as ryan discovered this is less
likely to get jammed in here however
it's a little bit more complicated to
clip everything this way if you're
right-handed so for left-handed people
this is probably even better now if you
want the safest option of course you can
clip the grigri to the smaller loop
however it's such a big journey to do
that but i'm really not a fan of this
who came up if i did to wiggle it in
there in that small loop and then do all
of this shenanigan so i kind of think
that black diamond could have improved a
thing or two in this design but it was
really fun to collaborate
with ryan and push this carabiner to its
limits so if you want to see more videos
like that consider supporting us
or just write a comment for the
algorithm that helps a lot as well
and enjoy climbing
safe here