On day two we found ourselves skirting round torrential cloudbursts… luckily it cleared just in time for the first outdoor session, in which we introduced the tower.
The thought behind the Drop Tower is to give something back to the industry, to create a platform which offers possibilities to improve our understanding of the ways in which we work and to provide the means to do replicable testing. The concept is for the tower to go to a number of events in Europe, probably three or four, and that at these, asides from the official program, people will be able to do their own testing. The way this would work is that if you have something you think would be worthwhile testing, you get in touch with us, we define a test set up and run the tests at the event. This would be free of charge, the only condition being that the results shall be published and made available to the public.
At the Climbers’ Forum this time we did some background tests, linking back to testing we had referred to in years past, but for obvious reasons were unable to show on site.
We looked at the effect that the angle at the anchor point has on anchor point loading in a single, stationary line configuration. The we compared the peak forces generated when dropping the 100kg test mass into a doubled running line vs. a single, stationary line set up. Next we compared energy absorption of systems by varying a stitched semi-static and a knotted dynamic lanyard between the test mass and the load cell and finally compared the performance of a couple of mechanical devices.
It was great to have Andreas Detter from Brudi Partner supporting us during the talk, as some of this stuff is not entirely intuitive and he’s just an good person to run a presentation with. Some of the results we were still discussing the following day, trying to make sense of the one or the other figure. Over all a very interesting session, interesting results and the tower was great! So easy and fast to reset the mass, offering loads of attachment options…
What were the results? Well, you should have been there if you want to know 😉
We will be writing these topics up in due course and some of the test need to be re-run to clarify what the variables are… topics for years to come!
Thanks to Knut Foppe for the photographs.