Racks and anchors

Are you confused yet Lars?

The best advice here is "it depends on where you climb."  That is what caused the wide range of advice about sizes, brands, types, etc.

Often guidebooks for an area have a list of gear for a "standard rack."  A good start would be to work on building the standard rack for the area you climb in.

If you can't fork out over $2000 to start out like Jon's list above, the cheapest entry is to buy nuts and hexes.  Another advantage to going with nuts and hexes is it will teach you to examine and understand the shapes and sizes of cracks, which will improve your skill at placing protection and using jams.  A third advantage is if you have to bail from a route it's much cheaper to leave nuts than $100 cams.

You could include a few cams in the most common size at the area you climb in, if your budget allows. 

One poster said to avoid offset nuts, but they are essential in places like Vedauwoo where many cracks are flared.  For example, If you were building a rack for Vedauwoo, I'd encourage getting a few offset nuts early in your acquisition of gear.

Newer climbers don't seem to trust nuts as much as cams.  "Nutcraft" (placing passive pro) is almost a lost art now.  Cams didn't become readily available until 1977 - big walls like El Capitan and Half Dome were climbed only using nuts and hexes before then. 

Good luck with your rack acquisition!

A lot of good advice here. Since you mention anchor building, something worth adding is that if you are close enough to a crag or just some usable outcrop of rock, do a lot of ground work with placements and anchors, just to get the feel and trust for your systems before you really need to trust them. Make an anchor, weight it, bounce around, examine how gear may walk and how to really set pieces in. Not all gear anchor set ups are going to be obvious so it helps to get creative on the ground and youll be more mentally equipped to think faster about making anchors at height. One of my biggest hurdles at the start of my trad climbing and sometimes still, I will waste time and energy picking the wrong sizes of gear and then fumbling to get the right size. Over time this comes much easier. 

What helped me tremendously was cobbling together a practice board that allowed me to play around with different setups (cordalette, slings, rope, etc.) and combinations.  That, coupled with a book or two on anchors,  will keep you entertained.  I threw this together so you can see what I'm talking about.

Shane Davis wrote:

What helped me tremendously was cobbling together a practice board that allowed me to play around with different setups (cordalette, slings, rope, etc.) and combinations.  That, coupled with a book or two on anchors,  will keep you entertained.  I threw this together so you can see what I'm talking about.

Love the door handles

Old school, don’t lead things you might fall on. Follow a lot.

Then you’ll know what you want.