Thoughts on hexes?

+1 for the DMM hexes

Kyle Edmondson wrote: And as for the alpine comment, while cams are heavier they fit a greater range, so you can get away with fewer.

1 Hexes have a larger range to weight ratio than cams
2 If you bring fewer cams to save weight you get fewer pieces to protect you.
3 For the alpine: ice, dirt, and mud are all common things to encounter and all make cams unuseable.

Have them. Never use them. Not worth enough to go to the effort of selling them.

Bill I will pay shipping :D

assholeclimbers.com/2012/02…

Geez, I'm not even a trad climber, and I can second Ted on hexes for anchors, especially top rope back from the top of a cliff. We have one area here, sandstone, where bolts aren't allowed. If you can't rig a sagebrush, the flat bits of rock at the top, or a Toyota Tacoma, you're out of luck. Anyway, big hexes can be chucked into funnel shaped holes and channels, with just the sling coming out through a slot, in seconds. I suppose you could chuck a cam in like a slung rock, but why?

Best, Helen

How often do you see big wall racks (a gear/placement intensive climbing style) with triple racks of hexes vs cams. The only people leaving the ground in Yosemite with hexes are out of towners. Walls in Patagonia say, with plenty of ice don't see hexes much either if at all. Dave has good points. Steering a new climber away from cams all together for the first year is silly because he/she would be totally deficient in understand such an important piece of gear.

I've never once wanted or needed a hex. They might be useful if you're trying to save money and just need some pro for easy romps or setting up TR anchors, but otherwise cams make more sense for pretty much every other application.

Colin Haley's take on cams in the alpine

cascadeclimbers.com/article…

Andy Kirkpatrick has an article on this.
andy-kirkpatrick.com/articl…

Hexes?

Love them.

That and flamecasting.

Have almost a full rack of hexes and never use them. They are for sale. Metolius. I never learned to lay one properly. When I took the AMC lead climbing course, we had to "aid" on our gear while being toproped for safety. Every single time I laid a hex and weighted it, pop, out it came. After 2 days of aiding on nuts, cams and hexes and every hex popped, I realized right then, no more hexes for me. Never used them since.

Like tricams, if you learn to lay them properly, people swear by them. But the ease of use of nuts or cams has made them unnecessary for me.

Long story short:

Buy hexes if you want to:
1) Save some money
2) Learn to place a variety of gear
3) Have lightweight doubles, especially for larger cams.

Regardless of the gear you take you need to learn to place it well. Cams do place differently than hexes, even if they often share placements, so I think it's important not to get in the mindset that you must learn x before y.

I have a set of DMM hexes because I wanted to learn how to use them. The blue one has been place MUCH more than I ever expected to. Granted it's the only size I don't have doubles in. I do like them on multipitch for anchors, or to save a cam when I'm at a solid stance.

Slung hexes are better than wires, in my experience. The wired hexes are too stiff and harder to place well in my opinion. Not a fan of the BD hexes as such.

Before buying, make sure that they'd actually be useful in the areas you intend to climb. Ask around, especially with experienced leaders.

I only use hexes if someone else has them on their rack. They're bulky, noisy, and rarely useful at the area I primarily climb (New River Gorge). Also, if you are image conscious and thin skinned, nothing screams newbie like a huge rack of hexes jangling around at the crag.

Throw away the small wired hexes and replace them with stoppers. Medium to large hexes sit in their placement much better with slings. If you get to a parallel sided crack take cams.

If I remember correctly hexes weren't great at j tree. Work pretty well in basalt and quartzite though. I'd say that TR setups and easy alpine terrain is the best application for hexes. Plus side for alpine is that you aren't out much money if you have to leave some behind.

Like tricams more than hexes personally. Mainly only use the hexes for top rope anchors these days.

That being said getting a good placement on a large hex is super satisfying!

I agree that the smaller sized Hexes aren't very useful - they overlap with big nuts, which are usually better. Ok to keep around if you really need to double that size, but rarely something I take with me. I usually do take the 2-3 largest Hexes (blue, yellow, red BD) because I don't normally carry doubles of cams that size (3-4+ C4) and they are super light so they don't present much of a drawback. Just clip 'em to the back of your harness and you have a "oh $&@!" backup piece and great anchor material to save yourself a cam.

DMM Torques are the way to go if you are going to get hexes.

Nothing wrong with that idea as long as you already have a full single set of cams. If not, finish purchasing your cams first, then add hexes. Hexes are bomber when placed correctly in good rock. That's one piece of gear that inspires confidence climbing over it. The ones that are going out of date are the Black Diamond Hexes as they have not updated the design in years.

Whether you like them or not is a personal preference. Don't let the haters get you down. Modern hexes have a place on a trad rack, but they are not the be all do anything type of gear that some people claim cams are. I find them most useful for protecting inward flaring cracks where a cam would walk into and umbrella. Otherwise they get placed on good restful stances, or for making anchors. In my own opinion I'd avoid the smallest sizes. For example size 1 through 4 in Black Diamond Hexcentrics, Metolius Curved Hexes, and Camp Carvex. You can place them with practice, and I did my first season leading trad, but after that I found it was not worth the time and effort. There was always an easier piece of gear to place or a different placement nearby. Tiny wired hexes are now never carried on me.

People approach using them in different ways. Some like to only carry the three largest sizes of hexes. Some go for medium and large sizes so that there is no overlap between the largest size nut and their smallest hex. Some like a whole set of them. Where you climb will also dictate how useful they are. I've never climbed at Joshua Tree, so I don't have any advice for you in that regard. But asking other Joshua Tree climbers would provide some insight, and so would talking with the sales people at the local gear store near Joshua Tree.

They are easy to place with lots of ground practice. A lot of people don't want to put the time into learning how to properly place them and develop the eye for seeing placements. That being said, I don't place them in areas of the route that are cruxy or pushing my limits unless it's an inward flaring crack. In that case it places much quicker than a cam and is a better placement.

Practical depends on how you use them, whether the rock formations at the crags work well with hexes, and how well practiced you are with placing them. There are some climbs and crags I don't place them on my rack as I know they are not useful. And others that they are immensely useful.

I personally feel that slung hexes are the way to go. Wired hexes even when slung properly tend to still lever and rattle loose the placement.

I've used five different types of hexes, and I feel the absolute winner in design and use is the Wild Country Rockcentrics. The rounded profile on them is brilliant as it can be set very hard so it doesn't have any chance of working loose. This is especially important in horizontal parallel crack placements with no constriction. And yes, the second can still get them out easily one handed by smacking the side of the nut tool against the hex backing it out the way it went in.

DMM Torque Nut would be my second pick if the Rockcentrics were not available. I love their sling that extends, but I find the square-ish shape not as useful as you can't set them as hard and not enough sizes. Now if only I could get my Rockcentrics re-slung like the Torque Nuts, that would be awesome!

Discontinued Camp Dyneema Carvex hexes which there is still some old new stock in stores come next in line. Slightly better than Black Diamond Hexcentrics because they are slung and have a rounded profile that works better, but significantly worse than the first two picks. I'd steer clear of these unless you need the largest size which DMM and Wild Country don't make any hexes in that size. Their four smallest sizes which only come wired I find are much more difficult to use than Black Diamond's Hexcentrics as Camp opted to use a thick 8 and 10kN wire which is really difficult to manipulate the hex into place working against the resistance of that thick wire.

Black Diamond Hexcentrics (the modern ones that are wired) I don't really like. My main problem is that even with it being properly slung they don't set very hard and they often end up rattling loose in the placement. The lack of rounded corners make them less versatile in anything less then mostly smooth rock.

Metolius Curved Hex is the bottom of the barrel. Worst hex I've ever used. It's wired causing problems with placements being rattled loose even when slung. It's too narrow in width making it unstable in sideways pulls in a horizontal placement. It's sideways placement is curved concave on one side and convex on the other rather than tapered, making placements for this with good rock contact really rare for what I climb on other placements in this orientation don't set hard. And despite it's curved shape, it absolutely does not set hard enough in it's cammed position. When I was using them I'd set them as hard as I could, and my seconds would always tell me that these hexes just lifted out of their placement with no effort when cleaning. That did not inspire any confidence in me. I set aside more time to practice ground placement with them thinking I just wasn't getting it right and still had the same problem with them. Don't bother with this brand of hex.

Here's some other threads I dug up for you to read about hexes that may help you decide:

mountainproject.com/v/which…

mountainproject.com/v/hexes…

mountainproject.com/v/slung…

mountainproject.com/v/dmm-t…

mountainproject.com/v/hexes…

I love my hexes and almost never leave the ground without them. I can carry a half dozen or so and they take up about as much room as a bigger cam. When placed well, they are totally bomber. There are places where they fit better than cams, and there are climbs where they never get set.

If you want to carry and set passive pro, hexes are part of that gear. If you just want a cheap alternative to cams, you are probably not going to set them very often, so there may not be a whole lot of reason to pick them up.

My older BD hexes are all slung on utility cord, and I have a few of the newer ones that are wired. I don't think I have compared them enough to know if the wires end up being a negative, but the cord works well. The wires do have a small advantage that you can use them to extend your reach when needed.