Old gear question
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New to climbing and would appreciate a gut-check: |
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If as you describe, then no. Go use them. I have older biners that I still use. |
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If the gates work solid, and there is no damage or excessive under visual inspection, you should be fine. But they are $15 each. Use them for non-climbing tasks and buy the ones that you are going to trust your life to new. |
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Most metal products should last forever, with proper care and inspection. |
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Super Fluke wrote:Most metal products should last forever, with proper care and inspection.Metal is not indestructible, it does experience fatigue failure over high numbers of loads. In this case, the carabiners haven't been used so they're fine if they don't have any visible damage. If you have really old carabiners that you've actively used for 20+ years then you should consider the fact they might not be ok. After many years of use, the fatigue damage might not be visible because of a phenomena known as wide spread fatigue damage (this would be why airplanes have service life limits). Here's an MIT paper giving the cycle number to failure at various loads. One of their conclusions is that there is no visible surface cracks before failure. web.mit.edu/sp255/www/refer… The cycle count is in the thousands so this is really only applicable to really old (like 15+ year old carabiners). This should not be taken as limiting carabiners too early; instead this is just something to think about for really really old carabiners. |
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Thanks Allen, Matt, Super fluke, and Alex, |