Assessing rope wear

[OpenTrackRacer]

Sorry to disappoint anyone who was hoping to get two halves of a rope... everyone survived and so did the rope! I'm glad it was okay... it was the first rope we used over a 600'+ deep shaft!

[Chads93GT]

Wyandott, i thought you meant, you would never use dynamic rope, even if you were a rock climber. Thats how I took it. I wasn't saying it was a good idea to drop caves with dynamic.

[wyandottecaver]

I know Chads,

I just wanted to clarify that there are significant differences in dynamic vs static besides and because of them being more "bouncy".

true-life story....I was emergency "fill in" help to run a rappel/climbing tower for a school group that showed up last minute. The lead instructor who was generally very knowledgeable was trying to give them confidence in the rope to catch them. He climbed 15' up on belay and asking for about 6' of slack jumped off. He expected to soft fall about 9-10' since we had been using a lower elongation dynamic (climbers were belayed with generally less than 1-2 ft slack). Instead, he had rigged a different high elongation rope, I hadn't noticed, and he smacked right into the dirt since the bouncier rope used his slack plus the stretch in 60' of rigged rope. It then pulled up and smacked him into the wall about 5 ft off the ground... Fortunately the rope had slowed him, but it was still embarrasing.

[knudeNoggin]

The old dynamic rope could be used for TR.
(UIAA once pronounced aged ropes safe for that until the sheath
wears through -- and they'd tested some that were twice as old.)
*kN*

I believe all dynamic ropes have a fall rating! 9 fall etc...
If you don't know the history of a rope I would cut it to usable
tie-down lengths and utilize them in that manor!

What manner of "manor" is this? (a typo I recall falling into
on a bike-ride cue sheet, btw :o)

In the case of the question, though, it was that "one of our guys just
retrieved his old rope from a closet." We should be confident
that he knows its history, and not penalize its use for coming out of
the closet. (Frankly, 11mm climbing rope strikes me as a pretty
hefty tie-down material.)

[wyandottecaver]

depends on who...errrr what you are tying down