While I was in San Francisco, I picked up a new suspension bar from Mister S. I'm going to return it, and I'd like to talk about why.
Suspension bondage is dangerous. To make it marginally less dangerous we use good equipment that we trust with our lives.
Hardware varies a lot in quality. Below are the pieces of hardware in common use in my dungeon.
The ones in the left column are climbing
carabiners, purchased from
REI. The ones on the right were purchased from
Home Depot.
I'm going to call your attention to detail on the carabiners.
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| The largest carabiner that will fit through the chain that I use in the dungeon. |
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| The flattest lower arc of the carabiners available at REI |
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| The smallest carabiner available at REI. |
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| detail showing the working load of the carabiner |
In these photos the working load is shown at the top edge of the hardware in the above photos. For the smallest, this is shown to have a working load along the major axis of 22
kN. A kiloNewton (kN) is about 225lbs. The carabiner will hold 7kN on the minor axis, and 8kN along the major axis with the gate open. The climbing carabiners will each easily hold over 4000lbs.
The items from Home Depot hold a lot less weight.
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| text stamped into hardware reads "SAFE WORKING LOAD 150LBS" |
To find the working load of some of the other hardware I had to go back to the store and look at the original packaging.
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The snap hook has a working load of 60lbs
The anchor shackle has a working load of 1320lbs
The quick link has a working load of 800lbs
The spring link (pear clip) has a working load of 170lbs |
And now we come to the spreader bar. I don't doubt the working load of the spreader bar, but the spots that things are attached the spreader bar are small. Too small. It is possible to get a quick link into the very outer attach point on the sides of the bar. It is possible to get a spring clip into the attach points on the bottom of the ends of the spreader bar. But it is not possible to get a quick link or climbing carabiner into any of the attach points welded onto the bottom of the bar.
The attach point at the center of the bar is even smaller.
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| The center attach point is so small that I could only get a padlock through. While padlocks are strong, they can't be trusted in mission critical scenarios. |
This becomes important because some of the hardware can fail in predictable ways. At my local gym today I noticed the clips shown below. They obviously cannot be trusted.
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| regular use has dug through the bottom of the spring clip. |
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| the gate has bent so that it barely makes contact. experience with climbing hardware makes me believe that this reduces the working load to 1/3 |
A spreader bar that can only be used with hardware that I don't trust is not valuable to me.
