Gear4Rocks Plastic Nuts Review

Nice job! Have you tried out their cams?

What about UV damage and overall shelf life? I think it would ease a lot of people's mind if they listed their materials.

Well, the answer I got back from gear4rocks regarding the material is that they are a polyamide, which many people here already guessed.

Regarding UV damage I think that the safe thing to do would be to treat them as all other gear and retire them if they have been in the sun too long.

Could be Nylon-6, could be Nylon-6,6, could be Kevlar.
FTIR would make it obvious if it had the benzene response.

Same offer as before- with a shaving of it, I could tell you.

Tony B wrote:Could be Nylon-6, could be Nylon-6,6, could be Kevlar. FTIR would make it obvious if it had the benzene response. Same offer as before- with a shaving of it, I could tell you.

Nah, it couldn't be Kevlar as the stuff falls apart with UV exposure. (check section II, page 13 of the linked .pdf...)

My bet would be straight Nylon-6 but making some from UMWPE would be funny...Maybe if I get bored next fall.

We use a material called Delrin in my job for keels in prosthetic feet. This is used for a mid-grade foot and can withstand many, many cycles before it breaks. Here is a link to it under its chemical name. I think it fits the description very well.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyo…

"POM is characterized by its high strength, hardness and rigidity to -40° Celsius. POM is intrinsically opaque white, due to its high crystalline composition, but it is available in all colors. POM has a density of ñ = 1.410 - 1.420 g / cm3.[2]"
"These units resist chain cleavage, because the O-linkage is now no longer an acetal group, but an ether linkage, which is stable to hydrolysis."

How accurate do you have to know the modulus? Getting a modulus greater than 2 or 3 GPa is pretty unheard of for a pure polymer.

NNEEEEEEERRRRRRRDDDDSSSS!!!!!

Brian Adzima wrote:How accurate do you have to know the modulus? Getting a modulus greater than 2 or 3 GPa is pretty unheard of for a pure polymer.

Tony B wrote: If you shave off a small section of the plastic and give it to me, I can get FTIR and SEM/EDX on it and identify the polymer/co-polymer and it's filler if it has any.

"polymer/co-polymer and it's filler if it has any."

That's the big question.
Many of the polymers thrown out there as suggestions here have common fillers.

i would like to say that i have taken BIG falls on this product and they hole up fine and im 250lbs

Great review.

While I have no doubt that these would hold a fall I wonder on their long term durability. Some have already pointed out UV damage could effect these nuts in the long term. Another thing to think about is the number of compress cycles these could handle before they become too elastic. Plastics degrade much differently from metal (as most of you probably know).

I'm not sure the $40 price tag is worth it if you have to replace them every 2-3 years. Compare that to the typical aluminum nut that lasts forever as long as you don't fall on it too hard.

Another issue would be ease of identifying when to retire these. With an aluminum nut you can visually inspect the nut and say to yourself "this looks sketchy I'm not using it anymore". With plastic would it be as easy to tell?

Ogre wrote:NNEEEEEEERRRRRRRDDDDSSSS!!!!!

Absolutely! Let's think about it... Jocks Vs Nerds...
Who was the classic Jock? Michael Jordon? Let's think it over.
He made $300,000 a game: $10,000 per minute presuming 30 minutes of play per game.
With $40,000,000 in endorsement contracts per year at his peak, he made $178,100 per day, every day, playing or not. So assuming he slept 8 hours a night he made over $44,000 while he slept on every night. When he went to see a movie it probably cost him $10, but he'd make $18,550 while he was there. A brand new Ferrari would cost him only 4 nights sleep... quite literally.
If Jordon were to put the federal maximum of 15% of his total earnings into a 401K deferred tax shelter, he'd have hit the federal cap for those deductions before 10am on January 1st.
If he gave you 1/10th of one penny for every dollar he made, you'd live comfortably on $65,000 per year- about twice the take home pay of a teacher with a master's degree...
At his peak, he made more money than all of the US Presidents made in all of their terms combined.
All of this is amazing. HOWEVER:
Micheal Jordon would have to save 100% of his peak income before taxes for 270 years to have the net worth that Bill Gates accumulated in his time.
NERDS RULE!

Tony B wrote: Absolutely! Let's think about it... Jocks Vs Nerds... Who was the classic Jock? Michael Jordon? Let's think it over. He made $300,000 a game: $10,000 per minute presuming 30 minutes of play per game. With $40,000,000 in endorsement contracts per year at his peak, he made $178,100 per day, every day, playing or not. So assuming he slept 8 hours a night he made over $44,000 while he slept on every night. When he went to see a movie it probably cost him $10, but he'd make $18,550 while he was there. A brand new Ferrari would cost him only 4 nights sleep... quite literally. If Jordon were to put the federal maximum of 15% of his total earnings into a 401K deferred tax shelter, he'd have hit the federal cap for those deductions before 10am on January 1st. If he gave you 1/10th of one penny for every dollar he made, you'd live comfortably on $65,000 per year- about twice the take home pay of a teacher with a master's degree... At his peak, he made more money than all of the US Presidents made in all of their terms combined. All of this is amazing. HOWEVER: Micheal Jordon would have to save 100% of his peak income before taxes for 270 years to have the net worth that Bill Gates accumulated in his time. NERDS RULE!

Wow. that is really cool. I didn't know that about MJ.

Matthew Carlson wrote: I'm not sure the $40 price tag is worth it if you have to replace them every 2-3 years. Compare that to the typical aluminum nut that lasts forever as long as you don't fall on it too hard.

Well yeah gear will last forever if you don't fall on it....or use it.

these work great. I actually use them more than my BD's

Sooo.... Here's the lowdown on the math that Phil was talking about in the original review post.

The guessed figures given didnt quite jive with the inevitable rope stretch but from the pictures it appears he may have been farther off the ground than he thought.

A body free falling for a distance of around 7 feet will atain a velocity of around 21.2 feet per second at the end of seven feet.

At this point the rope will begin to take weight and stretch. A static stretch factor of around 30% could be assumed for most modern ropes. With about 25 feet out, this means that Phil fell for an adittional 7.5 feet before stopping. During this deceleration his force maxed out at around 139.78 lbs.

There are 224.8 lbs PER Kilonewton. This means he exerted ONLY LESS than 0.7 KN. You need to fall like thirty to forty feet to begin to approach the 9 KN rating for the smallest plastic nut.

Any volunteers?

Isaac Dority wrote: A body free falling for a distance of around 7 feet will atain a velocity of around 21.2 feet per second at the end of seven feet. At this point the rope will begin to take weight and stretch. A static stretch factor of around 30% could be assumed for most modern ropes. With about 25 feet out, this means that Phil fell for an adittional 7.5 feet before stopping. During this deceleration his force maxed out at around 139.78 lbs.

Uhhhh... No. Not only is the math wrong, but your boundary conditions are set up all wrong. Double check and try again. If you don't find the problems, I'll explain. Meanwhile, I'll start with 2 questions:
What was on the other end of the rope away from Phil? and How much does Phil weigh?

muttonface wrote: Also, a lead fall of 7-9ft is 100% of the time going to put at the very least the weight of the climber on the protection and the probability that a fall of that length will produce at least 1kn of force on the piece fallen on is very high (unless the climber is absolutely tiny).

You guys are not catching on at all, are you?
How much force does it put on a piece of gear when a climber RESTS on the rope on it? 1g force = a climbers weight?
More like twice his weight if the next bit of pro is directly down from it.
Math is math, but you still have to set up a force balance. This is not rocket science.

Ahhh... the internet!

muttonface wrote: I also don't understand what your rebuttal of static weight on a piece of pro has to do with an educated guess of the forces of taking a 7ft lead fall onto it.

You obviously do not know what I am talking about, and your reply is ignoring the similarity in the system. Your response to my deliberate attempt to get you to even think about the simplest part of your system for yourself was ironic and the tone undeserved. Your eagerness to poo-poo anyone who doesn't agree with your fundamentally flawed ideas is going to make you the fool, not me.

You and the guy you were "correcting" are BOTH missing the point that the rope has 2 ends, and both pull downward with equal force on the same piece. He was obviously wrong. So are you if you equate rope tension to force on a placement.

Why would anyone be interested in either of your dynamic models when neither of you can even set up the boundary conditions for a static model? It is a indisputable fact that a rope in tension pulls from both ends, and the stopper has to balance all of that to a net force of 0 or the biner and the stopper will "accelerate."

Let me spell that out for you. Even statically, you have to roughly DOUBLE any force exerted by the climber (rope in tension) to figure what the protection will see. Dynamically the same thing is true.

There is a second lesson here too. Everyone is an expert on the internet, right? But I bet only one of us taught mechanics to engineers at a university and does mechanical failure analysis work for a living. And I don't think it is you, so please give that a long hard thought before flaming someone or even dismissing them lightly on the net. You never know who they are. Maybe they have a point...

muttonface wrote:My ONLY point was that the forces that Isaac mentioned were much greater than he alluded to. That's it. I'm well aware that the anchor that holds a fall, even statically, still takes anywhere from 1.6 to roughly 1.8 times the force that the climber feels. The belayer feels about 2/3 of the force that the climber feels. Guess what? I don't have to be a goddamned engineer to know that you're arguing a point that was never made. How about figuring out an equation that defines the direct correlation between your compulsion to spray about your academic accolades and your pompous prickish behavior. I would like you to quote where I said the anchor only feels one side of the rope's fall or that the behavior of the rope, excluding dynamic stretch differs statically and dynamically. Please tell me where I even so much as hinted at any of the things that you feel warrants this unrelenting nerd pomp: Back at the unjustifiably arrogant nerd cave... Presumptuous and pompous. Obviously I do. I just drink beer and get laid every once in a while so it only looks like I'm not smart. The irony, paradoxical nature and hypocrisy of this sentence is enough, in Dan Aykroyd's words, to "suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro." Rule number one: If you start out "correcting" someone with a smartass "uhhhh, no.", you then do not afford yourself the opportunity to point out a lesser deficiency of the same nature to someone else. In other words: More hypocrisy. Rule number two: You should probably wait to proclaim someone wrong until they actually say something wrong and not just "if" they happen to agree sometime in the future. LOL. Record yourself saying these things out loud then play it back; and let's see if you can learn a lesson. Uuhhh... scroll up smartass. Who flamed who first with a demeaning pompous tone? I just said he was incorrect. I didn't start a sentence belittling the guy like I was talking to a retard. Shitbird.

BAM!!