Auto Belay Machines: Awesome or Terrifying?
Andrew Bisharat, climber and writer extraordinaire, dog papa, crusher at Rifle, and blogger at Evening Sends is one of my favorite people ever! He has never once failed to make me fall on the floor laughing when I read his Facebook status updates. And he not only agreed to write a guest post, but he did it in less than 12 hours, while on a climbing trip to Lebanon. Andrew, you are the best š
I agree with everything Andrew thinks, and especially about Auto Belay Machines…which I find simultaneously awesome and terrifying.
Steph,
Good evening. Iām curious to know your opinion regarding the safety of auto belay machines at climbing gyms. I use the ones at my local gym, but Iām always slightly worried they are going to fail.
Have you used them before?
Thank you!
Amy
Hi Amy
My good friend Steph forwarded me your question and asked me to share my thoughts about the safety (or presumed lack thereof) of auto belay machines in climbing gyms. Iām guessing the only reason she thought to do this was that recently Steph and I met up to climb at a new gym equidistant from our respective homes, and I made a remark about not trusting those āblack boxes of death.ā
First of all, I should say that even finding myself in the grim situation of having to climb in a gym on an auto-belay machine (ABM) is a dark day indeed. In fact, Iād rather do almost anything else than climb on an ABM: campus, go bouldering, run on a treadmill, wear short-shorts on an elliptical, nothing, etc.
But when I am on an ABM, which I might only use to warm-up quickly, then I consider myself to be free soloing.
I admit that my distrust of ABMs is illogical. Iāve never actually seen an ABM fail, and I donāt know anyone who has ever had a problem with them. Typically, people die or hurt themselves on ABM when they forget to actually clip in properly. Aside from those instances of human (not mechanical) error, however, I havenāt heard of ABMs being problematic. Itās like all other infrastructure in America: when you see it everywhere, you just kind of assume it works and itās safe because you figure there must be someone whose job it is to make damn sure that this thing works safely.
So is there someone who has this job at your gym? Hell if I know. Probably. Itās America, after all.
My beef with ABMs is that I donāt like how they operateāthey go against what you train yourself to do in ānormal” climbing situations (and by normal I mean a situation in which you are belayed by a real human).
When you are on an ABM and fall off the wall, thereās a split second of free fall that occurs before you feel the ABM actually take your weight and begin lowering you at a controlled speed. When I am being belayed (by the people who I love and trust), I say āTake.ā After I say take, I feel my partner actually hold my weight. They might even say, āI have you!ā to reinforce it.
With ABMs, thereās no way to pre-test that theyāre going to work. Scream āTakeā all you want, itās not going to help you! Youāre on your own, chica. You just have to jump off the wall and endure that split second of doubt before the machine engages and you finally know that itās all going to be OK.
Ben Franklin once said āThe way to see faith is to shut the eye of reason.ā Well, hereās what I think: The way to get down a climbing wall when you are on an ABM is not to put your faith in that ABM. Thereās more than one way to get down a stupid little climbing wall. So … what do I do instead?
I down climb.
Why? Because I canāt have faith in anything that I canāt see inside.
Also, whatās so bad about down climbing? I do more moves and get stronger? My technique gets better? Sign me up for that.
Iāll stop at making the recommendation that you down climb too. In this sport we all have to draw our own lines over how much risk weāre willing to accept. This is just my own personal line in the sand. Good luck drawing yours.
Much respect,
Andrew
I donĀ“t agree in some points and would like to add some thoughts on my own and ask some questions on the matter. i hope nobody gets offended, this is just my two cents.
I donĀ“t think the normal case of falling is (and donĀ“t should be) to shout “take”. The case every belayer should expect, is the climber slipping or falling without notice. and even if you are shouting “take” on a lead fall, you will have this spit second of “not-knowing”, if you gonna fall to the ground or gonna be catched by your belayer.
do you “know” the webbing of your harness is going to hold? how would you see an error in the production of your biners oder belay devices? what if the rope doesnĀ“t fulfill the promise of the producer? we have faith in all our gear, why no have faith in a new piece of gear?
and most important: do you believe in god? donĀ“t take this as an offence, but it would suprise me if you say yes. “Because I canāt have faith in anything that I canāt see inside.”
For me climbing on an ABM is exactly the same as climbing on a treadwall, running on a treadmill or doing 4×4Ā“s on your own. itĀ“s training (alone) and its NOT rock. so what, you have to do what you have to do.
Bottom line: iĀ“m sure our (and your) tecnology and saftey standards are high enough to provide the service of an ABM.
cheers stefan from austria
of course i made some spelling mistakes (sp(l)it second…) and saw them when it was too late
excuse me please.
With all due respect to Andrew who is a great journalist and writer, he’s propagating an attitude towards auto belays which is unproductive and misleading for new climbers. Maybe a good analogy would be if someone had never flown, but was interested in travel and someone said to them of airplanes “can’t see inside them, so don’t trust them”. That person would be turned off a very safe, very useful technology,
The fact is that auto belays have almost never failed due to mechanical error. What’s more is they’re far less liable to mess up than buddy at the gym. So please, clip in, double check yourself, and climb on.
The previous commenters raise some important issues with this brief essay on ABM’s. First, I will echo that I too admire and appreciate Andrew’s writing. But, it would be nice to see a genuine and thorough treatment of these devices. As Stefan noted, ABM’s are nobody’s first choice of climbing partner. We all prefer attentive belays from our hot partners in pristine, uncrowded climbing areas. When that’s not available and ABM’s are, it might be useful to actually know something about how they work and their record of safety. Perhaps when I have a few hours a free time I can provide such a review, but until then I’ll have to keep waiting for another climbing journalist to do it for me.
I have been dropped my humans twice. Never by the ABM. When I go to an out-of-town climbing gym, I will always go with the ABM over the human I just met, until I have watched them belay and a level of trust is developed. I miss my climbing buddy (off on a world tour), but in his absence, the ABM is my best friend.
no worries, thanks for your thoughts!
š
it would be great to know about how they are maintained: that’s what I always wonder.
š
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Just to add my two cents to the discussion. I totally feel you on hating the ABM but they are totally safe. I used to manage a gym in Texas and I have actually seen one fail. When the mechanism fails it is designed to jam up. From what I witnessed and my enginerd brain it looks as if the device has a mechanical preset for maximum descent rate, when this is exceeded the mechanism jams. You can also see this happen when someone that is over the max rated weight (ours were up to 250#) get on the ABM. They will accelerate down at a faster rate when the rate becomes to quick it jams like a safety belt and they stop. It then proceeds to release again and jams when they reach that speed again this process is repeated until they reach the ground. If i remember correctly ours had maintenance inspection dates on the device and we had them sent in regularly to be serviced based on that. Other than that you can always inspect the nylon and test the device yourself which is what I did on a regular basis. Hopes this helps your faith in the black box, they were designed and engineered well from what I can see.
good to know, thanks for all the specific information!
Perhaps it helps you if you are aware that our STAR-series auto belay devices are thouroughly tested (static, dynamic, energy & function) according European (Industrial) height safety & evacuation (descending) standards BS EN 360 and BS EN 341 class-A. http://star-srl.com/cwd.html
First I’d like to explain that I am a safety and reliability engineer. It is my job to make sure that these types of devices work as they should do and that all reasonable precautions have been taken to ensure that they do not fail in a dangerous way. So last night was my first time using an auto belay and I should look at this device and understand the amount of work that has been done to ensure that it works as it should and understand that it should be more reliable than a human operator but I just could not put my trust in it. When you are 10m up in the air and you have to just let go of the wall and trust that it will take you down safely was an insurmountable mental challenge that I could not overcome. I was up there for several minutes with my arms tiring. 1 2 3 nope still holding on, again 1 2 3 nope. I finally decide I can’t stay up there so I try to climb down, my foot slips I lose my grip and I fall. It is much easier to trust that they are going to work when you are falling and have no choice. So there you go just fall off, much easier to get over the fear š
Aren’t those standards for accidental fall protection, though? Not for repeated use over and over again every day?
The author is right that he does not have the prerequisites to trust the automatic system, since he does not understand their device, never did the assembly and did not test them. I will say for the autobelay that we developed. First, before such a product goes to the market, it is tested tens of thousands of times on a specially created test bench. But this is surely done by all manufacturers. And if autobelay passed even a million trials, it does not mean that in principle the options for the failure of the device are excluded. And no one wants to be the first in this statistics. Therefore, we are the first and only in the world to provide for a double safety system for automatic insurance. At the same time, our braking system is designed for braking a car weighing more than a 1000 kg and tested by millions of kilometers in the automotive industry. In the event that the owner of autobelay violated the inspection and replacement rules for autobelay parts, which led to the malfunction of one brake system, the second protective system automatically turns on. This unique system of double safety puts an end to the discussion of the safety of autobelay. In order not to advertise our product, you can You can apply to our e-mail and we will give you exhaustive information: bclubformat@gmail.com
standards will never replace the real work of the device and does not guarantee the serviceability of its operation. Therefore, we created a unique insurance (see the answer above)