This repeated motion and loading can eventually cause a fatigue failure in the metal. If you're a guy who buries his picks with each swing (like me), it's the levering motion of REMOVING the pick from the ice that puts a three-point bend load on the ice pick the ice acting as a fulcrum. What most people don't realize is that picks don't typically weaken by being slammed into the ice, rather they weaken from being removed. But does this ice-specific performance characteristic come at a cost of durability? YES! High performing, ice-specific picks with smaller cross sections are designed for easier penetration and less ice displacement.
Mixed picks and all-mountain picks usually have a larger cross section (i.e., thicker with more material at critical stress areas), and therefore can take more abuse. There are basically three types of ice-tool picks: beefy mixed climbing picks, mountain picks, and high-performance, ice-specific picks.
We'll start off with ice gear, then in subsequent posts I'll discuss rock climbing and mountain gear. Read on for some objective test data on the realities regarding the fatigue life of some of the products that continually pop up. As a caveat, don't believe everything you read online-if you do, I have a friend in Nigeria who will wire you $100,000 and all you have to do is send him your bank account information. Yes, we monitor the blogs and chat rooms for trends, information and what is being discussed, and are constantly surprised by both the nature of the commentary (sometimes factual and sometimes not) and the tendency of most blog/forum readers to accept everything as true. We test all gear (not just BD, but all our competitor's gear, too) and do so scientifically and objectively. One last thing: my job at BD is to manage a team of engineers that test and break gear all day, every day. It's up to each individual climber to make the choice and understand the possible ramifications of these decisions. You can also purchase more specialized, lighter gear, but it generally won't be quite as burly. Also, as the climbing standards increase, we're torquing our picks and crampons, whipping on sketchy pins and cams and just generally being way harder on our gear.īut just as you can buy beefy, all-terrain radials that last longer than high-performance race tires, you can buy rugged climbing gear that'll last longer, but at a cost of weight and performance. But even back in the day, climbing gear had a useable lifespan. Yes, back in the day some climbing gear did last longer, because it was designed and manufactured to be more robust and consequently was heavier and ultimately didn't perform as well. If I took a set of tires with 60,000 miles on them back to the tire shop to get replaced, I'd get laughed at-same is true for climbing gear.
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