Basejumper.com - archive

Anybody have any experience in throwing their climbing gear from a cliff attached to a pilot chute. I have seen it a video (can't find it) and wandering how it will work. Planning on throwing somethin like 5-10kg off a 300mt cliff. Any tips of what can go wrong?

From what I have found a pilot chute can apply a force of over 35 kg at 3.5 seconds (46") so I think it should work fairly well but wanted to get some first hand info/tips.

If it's only 10 kg why throw it? Just jump it down. I don't know what it looks like but pilot chutes are not all that stable. they tend to ossolate and slip. It would suck to get it hung up which is a real possibility.

Lee

It's more a thing about volume than weight, I guess. It would be the typical climbing gear: rope, quickdraws (10), gri-gri.

Do you say to just strap the rope on the belly (the other jumper the quickdraws) and jump with it? Could be a bit uncomforable, but It could be done.

I regularly throw my climbing gear attached to an running training parachute, it's like a 65 pilot chute and far cheaper, google it for info. I got mine on Ebay, and use it at a 1000 ft cliff

Mine is something like this
http://wap.ebay.es/Pages/ViewItem.aspx?aid=111094769977&emvAD=420x521&sv=training%20parachute&emvcc=0&nbcol=0%7Cnull

A Couple buddies and i recently made a jump similar. One friend jumped with rope coiled around chest and belly, like a vest. Another friend and myself split ~14kg of cams quickdraws etc.. My friend strapped his around belly, but my suit was tighter so i hung them from my harness on slings and taped them to my inner legs, within the ws.. throw it off if you can ;D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUCLPJpdbV0

From 5:44

(RIP Gus.... )

Each person can easily carry a 60 m line coiled around his body. About half goes around your belly and 1/4 at a diagonal over each shoulder. Doesn't bother my rig at all. I've actually carried two ropes but that was pushing it a bit. Between pockets and maybe a small fannie pack turned around backwards on your belly or a stash bag worn backwards held down by chest strap and belly band you can carry a lot of pro. Two guys can split a decent rack between them.

If you're really just going to use a pilot chute then it's not really going to slow it down that much. It just orientates it so that it lands right side up. I just don't like to risk damaging good beaners or pro that way. That's going in my pockets any ways.

If you were really serious about doing it right, some thing occurred to me. These guys...

http://www.freefallaccessories.com/mili.html

Sorry there web site sucks, build a really cool timer for drogue release. It's a spring loaded pneumatic timer. No batteries, no cutters. It pulls a little pin. You could toss it with a PC and set the delay to pull out a little PDA round say 10 ft. It might make a decent system.

I just prefer to jump with it. I sort of lost a pack once and it took me a week to get it down. There was kind of this storm... I just prefer to jump stuff down now.

Lee

Yup, that is definetely the idea. Much cheaper than a PC. Definitely worth a try.

Wasn't the one I was looking for, but thanks. The one I remember is from some french guys in a much higher cliff. It looked like the gear was going down very fast.

Yeah, from the video that was posted it definitely looked like it was going down very fast. At that speed I would not risk throwing down the quickdraws, cams, or beaner. But maybe the rope.

Jumping with it is probably not much of a problem for short delays but for a high cliff like 1000-1500ft when you want to start tracking it seems like it will be a pain in the ass.

It doesn't seem to bother this guys much http://vimeo.com/63148027

If it were me i'd just put the rope in the bottom and the metalware on top and hope for the best. I've dropped gear from quite high up a bunch of times and other than scratches it always survived ok. Hell, half my rack is swag i found at the bottom of routes

But then again, very rarely high cliffs are sheer vertical all the way so if you do throw them down, what can be a pain in the ass is to actually retrieve them. Especially if we´re speaking about WS jumps where the bottom of the start wall easily means 3-4 hours of a hike from the landing area.

It's video with me and my friends. Actually the container with gear is falling faster in the video than in reality. In reality, it was falling slowly enough and very stable. At the bottom of the container we put the rope, metalware on top. No carbiners were harmed

It was stabilizing parachute of paratrooper, not the pilot chute. But they are similar - diameter 1200mm.

Perhaps last guy should throw gear if he can miss the guys already down in case of being needed in a rescue?

Jump it off.
Here we jumped a full rack +, 4 ropes( 10x60m and 3-6mmx200ft haul lines) , climbing helmets, and a ton of other crap off of Castleton Tower. All in all it was about 60-80 lbs of gear.
Would have been a nightmare to find the gear if we had pitched it with a round.

https://vimeo.com/71339818

-Harry

Nice mission. Kor-Ingalls route? I got the north chimney last year but the winds were nuking and the rig stayed packed :(

Just keep in mind, in most cases you can’t tell if the metalwear strength has been compromised by taking a fall. Carabiners especially, are susceptible to hair-line fractures if they are dropped. These fractures can’t be seen by the naked eye, but can drastically weaken a carabiner. When unloaded, any cracks are most likely closed and not visible. They will open under load, when it is difficult to inspect (like when you are taking a fall on that piece of gear).

One could say using a PC for an upright directional and putting the metalwear on top of a rope will cushion the impact, but it could still potentially cause some damage. The problem isn't that a dropped biner forms a crack and has a lower residual strength when tested immediately, but rather that a significant drop could produce a crack initiation. If the biner is then put back in service where it is cyclically loaded, the initial damage will propagate in fatigue crack growth. Each load cycle grows the crack and lowers the residual strength. Eventually the crack will reach a critical size in which the biner will fail, most likely via ductile tearing. The only way to know if dropped metal gear is fit for use is to test it to its breaking point, which probably would be during taking your next fall on it, while leading a climb, or while doing a tyrolean onto a tower you want to jump

In MHO, throw the rope down if you have to, but jump all the metalwear yourself. Or renew your rack frequently

Just some food for thought.

korr-ingalls is correct. Was going to do the north chimney, but didn't like how manky the pro placements looked the first 75-100 ft.

-Harry