I just realized I left out Aric - thanks for doing the testing and making the information available, and thanks for all the very convincing photos. I stopped using my remaining Aliens after the recall, and was just adding them back into my rack this year. Now I've lost my faith in them altogether, especially given that all of mine are from 2005.

Thanks for bringing up such a serious safety issue, however, as a mechanical engineer I don’t believe that your study was designed well enough to take to court or anything like that. There are too many variables involved. The fact that the cams were used (one bootied) would raise a big issue. The fact the trigger wires were fixed with wire would also raise some flags. I realize that the trigger wire has no effect on the strength of the cam but it could show that the cams have been abused.

My opinion is that your tests do raise some serious concerns, enough to keep me from using aliens, but you would need to run a much more controlled study if you wanted any real results.

A used cam breaking at 11 kN does not concern me too much, but one with no brazing is pretty scary!

Mark- Well, as an REI member I'd say don't return them as it'll cut into my dividend.... ;-) (joking... )

Dan- Pics of the setup and everything else is over in the thread on RC (pics before testing, in the fixture, after testing, load curves, etc). If you wouldn't mind looking there it'll save me having to make edits in multiple places should something come up. You may have to go a page or three to get to the specs on the puller, but a full description is there somewhere.

-aric.

Jmac-

Very true, there are way too many variables but I didn't design the test to be able to have evidence for a court. I just like to break things. :-)

That said, aside from the broken trigger I feel it is a representative example of what's out there in the wild on people's racks though, and the faulty braze should be enough to get a reputable company to launch an investigation. Sadly I have my doubts whether that will happen.

I don't know if I said it here on MP but I'm not as worried about the Purple. My issue with that one is that its a new failure mode and depending on how the results of hardness testing come out may indicate that a batch of axles missed heat treatment. Again, its the sort of thing that a reputable company would have launched an investigation over since its a failure mode that would not have been caught by what their website says is their current QC process.

What I'd really like to see at this point (aside from CCH getting their head out of their ass) is for me to get out of the middle of this and have a group effort send a big ol' pile of gear to a professional testing facility to get certified results. I believe mine are certainly in the ballpark if not correct, but as has been pointed out (including my me) my gear is not certified and I do not do this professionally.

-a.

The bigger shame here is that the American Alpine Club still does nothing for climbing safety. It's the organization that represents US climbers to the UIAA yet there is no budget for testing and investigating anything. We have to rely on companies doing in-house testing and QC, which may or may not get reported and often is more about marketing. Letting a volunteer pay to attend an annual safety meeting is about all the AAC bothers with (it happens to be in Golden next week but the agenda shows it will be a waste of time).

agreed

The fact that it seems every time someone grabs a randomly chosen handful of Aliens and tries to break them in a somewhat controlled and measured way, something incredibly disturbing comes up - that's just bad.

Yeah - 11kN is a pretty impressive and high breaking strength - but the wire was likely still overheated. The Souder's Crack incident failed the same way, but likely way below 11kN. What kind of controls do they have here? What kind of strength variation are they getting over 1000's of pcs? Therefore, I find this failure just as disturbing.

Now that would be worth something.

I second the vote to get the AAC to translate some of the testing as well as some of the great training manuals printed and used in Europe. The Leherplan's used by the german DAV are great. But my german sucks so I end up staring at all the pictures just trying to figure out what their point is.

The brits do a great job with all the stuff for the Alps. Why can't we make safety a focus for the AAC?

Hey guys,

In case you're interested in chipping in, the folks over on RC are clamoring for testing of new Aliens and I'll be heading to NY on Tuesday to get some. I'll be taking the puller along so the owner of the gear shop can witness the testing since he'll likely have more sway with CCH than I do and because he kinda has an interest in seeing them _not_ fail under spec.

The plan is to buy however many samples we can get for the money raised, minus my gas and tolls (~3.5 hours each way, car gets ~30mpg). The gear shop has agreed to let us have the samples pretty much at his cost plus shipping, so even a couple bucks will help.

If you'd like to use Paypal my address there is adatesman@yahoo.com. Otherwise my snail mail address is 47 Prospect Ave, Norristown PA 19403. Make sure to make a note of which site you're from and your username as its been a bit confusing for me to try and sort out who's who. Also drop me an email or a note in any of the threads with the amount you'll contribute so I can add it to the running total (I'll be fronting the money for this to allow time for checks to arrive).

BTW, the plan is to cherry pick his stock for the ones that look most likely to have problems (overheating of the cable, porosity in the braze, etc.). I'm not interested in establishing failure rates, only whether faulty gear can be found sitting on the shelf ("faulty" = breaking under spec). All of the gear tested will get the works regardless of outcome, with pics before the test, pics in the fixture, pics after the test, datalogs of the forces and cross sectioning of the head after testing.

-aric.

Hey Aric,

I definitely would like to contribute to the cause. I really appreciate your taking the time and effort to do this. I think it is a huge service to the community as a whole. I do have a question though (and maybe other MP and RC people can post to help with this). Since you are donating your time and effort to do this, it would seem reasonable that those of us in the community that are benefiting from this should be shouldering all of the financial burden in exchange. In order to do this though, we kind of need to know how many people are donating, so that we can figure out how much each person should be donating. I know this information may be hard to tally, so perhaps you could post how much cash you think you will need to cover this, and then suggest a donation amount for individuals.

Thanks again for taking the time to do this.
Cheers.

One more thing....what shop in NY are you doing this with?

Aric-

I think the strength values found on the CCH website might be the failure load for the cams. If this is accurate, it would be expected that most of the cams would fail at or just below these values. To be fair, I don't think a unit that breaks a few percent below it's absolute failure load is "faulty". Could you check on this?

Thanks,
Geir

Last I updated the tally we were up to $180. Here's a link: Clicky! It needs to be updated again, but its accurate as of the time stamp at the top of the list. I'll only be posting and maintaining the list in that post on RC because it would be a major headache to keep half a dozen of them in sync on all the sites people are coming from. Sorry about that. My plan is to test a minimum of 5 cams, but if people contribute enough to test more than that I'll test more. My gas/tolls will probably be in the neighborhood of $80, in a minivan that gets ~30mpg. Its a ~3.5 hour drive each way, mostly through toll-happy NJ. Part of the reason I posted the tally was to avoid possible accusations of scamming people, so I'll probably be posting copies of receipts to RC once I get back. I'd take the TDI wagon (~45mpg), but the pull tester doesn't fit in it and is way too heavy for the roof rack.

The shop is Rock&Snow since they're the closest one to me that still has Aliens in stock. In case no one noticed, EMS dropped CCH a month or three ago. EMS no longer has them on their website and of the half dozen or so stores within an hour of my house there's a grand total of 2 Black Aliens. The next closest ones are in NY and MA.

BTW, Rich at R&S has been quite helpful with all this and has been involved from the beginning. I had his number handy on the way home from the NRR (where the tests were done) and called to see if he knew anything about CCH's current QC process since I had some concern about what's been going on post-recall. I hate having dragged him into this so kindly refrain from bugging him about it. I've never met him but from my interaction with him this week I get the impression he's a great guy and I really, really appreciate his help.


@Geir- From my understanding there is no safety factor included in rating climbing gear and generally the rating given the equipment is a value the manufacturer guarantees as the minimum breaking strength (which is how the CE/UIAA spec is worded as well). Several of the manufacturers use 3Sigma to determine this (BD and I think WC) and I think Trango does something a bit different involving a percentage of minimum breaking strength of a large sample (I don't recall the details, but there's a post from Mal@Trango explaining it somewhere on RC). I don't know about the other manufacturers and at this point I don't think the people at CCH are talking to me so can't ask what they do. Not that I'd trust them to give me a straight answer anyway... My 3 days of calling/emailing them about these failures went decidedly poorly on their part, but for now I won't be releasing the transcript.

As for breaking before rating, I think I'd be of the opinion that anything below rating should be termed a failure as I believe it would be the sort of thing that could result in losing CE certification. I'm more concerned about manufacturing defects though and will be cross sectioning the heads of all of the tested gear.

Thanks for the info. Aric. I will be pooling cash from as many people as I can talk into it and will make one donation out of it.

Thanks J. Albers.

PS @ Geil- In case I didn't mention it before, I'll be posting all of the results regardless of the result. I couldn't care less whether CCH stays in business; only that no one gets hurt by manufacturing defects or mis-rated gear. Frankly I'd prefer they step up and handle this properly, but at this point I think chances are slim of that happening.

-aric.

Aric - we retired our Aliens this week, with the plurality of the evidence being your cross-sectioned 2002 unit. Thanks again for your work and neck on the line.

I took a look at ours - I have a blue Alien that appears to have less material around the joint than the others. It's probably a late-90s unit. I will send it to you, or just pictures, if you're interested.