Well early on in the week i was ranting on about outdoor providers offering their services as the ‘best outdoor course providers in North Wales’. Now sweeping statements like that are the sort of thing I am often brought up on when writing. However Wild Country have come up with pretty bold statement.
“THE LIGHTEST KEYLOCK SCREWGATE EVER”
Brave words, and similar claims have been made of snapgate carabiners in the past, and what followed was something close to the infamous Bake Bean Wars of the 1990’s. For those of you who weren’t students in this era, basically supermarkets kept up this competition for who was selling the cheapest tin of baked beans, as each chain reduced the price, another dropped it even further until it was only 1p a tin in some stores and the effect of having a ‘lost leader’ cancelled itself out and sense returned to the pricing of Britains favourite bean.
It strikes me that this is what has been happening with carabiners, each company shaves gram or two off the last companies design to have that coveted title of ‘Lightest carabiner…..” in there marketing jargon.
Now I was shown Wild Countries lightest carabiner today in V12, and funnily enough DMM are bringing out one that is 2 grams lighter next week. So the claim will be short lived. Now I know that manufacturing processes have improved massively over the last few years with hot forging and I beam construction, however there must come a point where the strength of a carabiner meets that 1p per can of beans, the theoretical rock bottom and its just stupid to go any further down the scales.
I know there was an article on UKC about some guy researching carbon composite carabiners, having had a several squash racket snap over the years, I can’t say I would be keen to have a carbon carabiner, and having seen the research while back I really don’t think any engineer worth there salt would choose carbon composite as a material for carabiners. In a few years from now we might get some carbon nano-tube technology, however despite there immense strength to weight ration, they have yet to make a nano-tube more than a few atoms long!
So anyway, rumour on the street is if you want the lightest carabiner in the world this week then buy the wild country one, if however you can wait a week then DMM offering will probably be released!
NB: The author in the past received equipment of DMM, as such is extremely biased toward his local company that has helped support his and many other locals climbing. Not to mention that DMM is the only manufacturer to make its hardware in the UK, and as such it employs many local people. In light of the ‘wild cat strikes’ I thought supporting British manufacturers might be a good thing, ‘British jobs for British workers’, rivers of blood and all that….