New 6mm webbing coming

[john]

After talking to some IME guys who went to a recent trade show I found out that this year the thinnest ever webbing will be released. About a year and a half to two years ago mammut intoduced its 8mm slings and revolutionized the market in my opinion. The slings are super strong ultra thin and light reducing the bulk in multi piece anchors. Mammut also offers a 16ft, 10mm version for cordlette style applications. Next they will offer a 6mm, that will be awesome I can hardly wait to try it and reduce the bulk even more. This made me wonder about various strengths of materials and functionality. The link below is quite informative and dispells many common myths I regularly hear circulating, although it doesn't test the mammut it is very interesting, have a look.

http://www.xmission.com/~tmoyer/testing ... h_Cord.pdf

[dcentral]

cool article, I'll have to look at it later.

I just started doing rope rescue, and its a different world then climbing. Everything has to have a 10:1 breaking strength, we use 11mm ropes and everyone is always on belay wether rappelling or ascending.

Talk to some people on the team who don't climb think using an atc is just a bad idea. It's interesting that you mentioned myths cause I think there's a lot of those out there.

[Shawn B]

He did a lot of cool testing back in the late 90's and early 2000's. Here is the site with more testing: http://www.xmission.com/%7Etmoyer/testing/ Some pretty interesting reading. I used the Vectran cord when it first came out until they found it lost so much strength over time/loading. It was great as it was so compact. But 7mm cord is the way to go for a cordellette. A bit bulky but cheap and strong.

6mm spectra slings now? That's pretty skinny. I do love the 8mm ones trippled up but 6 might be kinda hard to get my head around. It's getting pretty skinny to girth hitch in my mind too. I don't even like to girth hitch the 8mm ones. Any thoughts on how the width of the webbing affects the strength of a girth hitch? For me I figure the narrower it is the more likely it is to fail.

I find most ropes specialists overkill everything. In climbing, we want redundancy. They have to have everything backed up 5 times over. Sometimes to the point of it being too much. I'm sure they look at us as if we are not safe...which is the case sometimes. I'm seeing more and more questionable practices all the time these days. I usually don't say anything but I draw the line when someone else is setting up their anchor on the same 2 bolts I'm using with a death triangle. Man that is just basic stuff.

[Brent]

6mm is skinny. I don't question the breaking strength as much as the durability. The new synthetics are hard to cut though. If I didn't already have 10 8mm runners I'd buy 6mm.