Ice Screw 'Tests'

[Couloir]

Interesting clip. Nothing too emperical here. Maybe more entertaining than anything else. Apologies if this has already been posted and/or sprayed.

 

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[Dannible]

Looks like fun .

I just got How To Ice Climb by Craig Leubben (75% off at FF ) and it has a lot of good stuff on drop tests that he and BD did. One set of tests involved dropping 185 lbs 16-28 feet onto screws in decent but not great ice; in these tests, 7 out of 12 screws ripped. A more realistic test was done by running the anchored end of the rope through an ATC with a 75 lb. weight simulating a break hand to make the falls more dynamic. The screws held three out of three times .

 

In static tests in ice ranging from good to bad, the average strength of medium and long screws was 3,300 lbs, and 2,670 for stubbies. The strongest was a BD 6 incher that held 7,000 lbs, but in most cases the biners broke before that point. It seemed like in bad ice nothing worked well (no surprise there). One of those cheap Russian titanium screws held 2,700 (more than I would have guessed), but was bent in half by the time it pulled.

[powderhound]

These were the guys that I was speaking of earlier when someone was asking about screamers. This is a small section of larger film they will be putting out next year showing all the tests they did on ice screws. They film will cover, stubbies, tied off screws, spectres, ice piton, with and w/out screamers. In all varied types of ice on locations form canmore, to ouray, to Hyalite.