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Lone Wolf Hand Climber Failure ... It wasn’t pretty

This is true but ask yourself this. While there have been many documented failures of the LWHC seat failing how many times have you heard of the platform section failing? There may be but i personally haven’t heard of a single one.

When my LWHC seat failed 7 years ago even i wasn’t using it for saddle hunting i was just using it as a climbing stand as it was intended to be used.

That being said, it’s my opinion it’s the added stress of standing on them for hours at a time, shifting your weight, standing on the edges, etc is what is shortening their life and causing failures. When i climb with one as a climber i just lean into it with my forearms on it and it’s just for a moment.

When i saddle hunt off a platform i spend a fair amount of time applying side pressure or putting my weight all the way on the outer edge as opposed to just standing on the entire platform with my feet squarely planted on the platform as your hinder would be while sitting on it. In fact, i bet i spend most of my time way out on the edge of my Mission platform as opposed to actually standing on it.

I mean, they are failing quite a bit so in the end i am not sure it really matter as to why that may be. I’m certain if you were to ask Lone Wolf they certainly wouldn’t endorse using the seat as a platform.

So bottom line, if you use one this way have a solid plan for self rescue should it fail and plan and practice as if you expect it will at some point. That way it doesn’t catch you by surprise and cause you to panic if and when it does.

We all assume a fair amount of risk every time we hunt i just hope all of us get to go home to our families at the end of the day.

Good post. I was doing some research to think about steel screw links VS aluminum carabiners, and found some info I hadn't heard of before that might apply here. It was about metal fatigue. Below a certain force, steel does not fatigue to failure. You can put a small weight on it over and over and it will not shorten its life and will usually deform before breaking even then. What I learned about aluminum was kind of scary (sorry if you know all this stuff and thanks for humoring me!). Any force at all pushes it towards failure from fatigue, with larger forces having a greater tendency to do this (makes sense). I'll have to go back and look, but I'm pretty sure they were talking about forged and not cast metals. My intuition is that cast aluminum would have more of this negative property (could be wrong, we have a welders here that will correct my screw ups!). And thinner sections are probably worse. So, if you applied 20 lbs of force to an aluminum carabiner a couple million times, then you would break it.

This information has caused me to decide to retire aluminum carabiners and platforms every 3 to 5 years, even if they show no signs of stress (because I'm paranoid like that when 30 feet up in a tree in the winter alone without a cell signal). I saw some climbers recognizing this about aluminum carabiners and I believe they were stating that this should determine industry retirement rates for equipment, but it currently does not.
 
. Most of use who use the Lone Wolf Hand Climber as a foot climber/platform have it physically tethered to our saddle in some manner. This is not foolproof, as it can still be difficult to get it back up to your feet if it slides down the tree.

You sir are absolutely correct. I had not one but two (duel) tethers securing my platform to my hand climber as well as stirrups on the platform that held my boots very securely in place. Between the duel stirrups and tethers it was essentially impossible for me to drop my platform. My biggest issue was the hand climber was of a closed face design and I am considerably wider at the chest and shoulders than the inside area of the close aspect of the hand climber and there was a very real and significant risk if I allowed my torso to slip to far down in the hand climber i could become wedged and stuck in place unable to bring my upper body strength to bare and elevate my self free.

The Summit Viper II is deigned so that you sit and stand to do your climbing and descending. To sit you face the tree sit on the outer bar farthest from the tree and then using your legs and feet move your platform up or down accordingly. When you wish to move down you first collapse the fabric seat and secure it accordingly, then you face the tree and sit on the outer most bar that closes the face of the hand climber. Then you lift your feet up and simultaneously angle your toes down braking the platform away from the tree, then once you move your feet and platform your desired amount you essentially perform the process in reverse to capture the tree truck with the platform.

It was when I went to capture the tree trunk and placed my weight on the platform the platform would fail to grip and start slipping down the tree trunk. My one and only explanation was the only factor that was different and not present in any of my other uses of the stand (all of which went laterally text book perfect) was the fact the tree bark was literally soaked with water. Maybe maybe not the fact it was a tree made of very hard wood and very smooth bark could have also been a factor.

While practicing while as close to the ground as we could with my friends that one day we also had ladders including extension ladders as well as screw in tree steps to get a person down if need be so we all purposely tried to get ourselves stuck by using the stand incorrectly in every manor we could all think of and none of us could get ourselves stuck to the point where we couldn't get ourselves out of it unaided.

My friend bought that stand from me and has used it without issue for over a decade now. At the end of the day maybe it was a case of operator error after all. But i have while at my friends home who bought the stand used it 5-6x to climb large black walnuts like the one that gave me my problem and everything went perfect, but unlike the problem tree these trees were bone dry.

I have discussed what happened at great length with my friends who are climbing stand fin antics and even several calls to Summit and i still have no real idea why what happened happened. Summit said that a tree in theory could become to slippery for the stand to grip but they never have heard or experienced it happening. It is obvious comes down to either I was doing something wrong or the tree was somehow to slippery for the stand to work as designed.
I guess I will never know.
 
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I had a lone wolf hand climber break completely apart durning my descent on Sunday.
my tether was high using this combing method . When the platform broke I dropped and the rope man was doing its job . I also had a lineman rope on. Thankful for this . I was unable to relieve enough tension on bridge to release the rope man . I struggled for 20 mins . My legs were killing me and I was getting short of breath . I was able to do a one hand pull up on tether and loosen my mantis leg straps this relieved some pressure and allowed me to start working on loosening the mantis buckle strap . Once I did this I was able to manage to get it unbuckled . My lineman rope kept me close to tree . I was able to get my carbiener free from the bridge at that point and I grabbed the tree and shimmied down . very scary and unnerving . I use hawk sticks normally but these were on another tree with my hang on for my morning spot .
thos was my first try with the lone wolf hand climber . Really worked well practicing with it and going up to 20 feet . I weigh 195 lbs the only thing I can think of that would have caused this to fail was on my descent the rubber strap may have been to tight to tree causing the platform to have a more acute angle ? Not sure but this should not have failed . I’ll see if I can post some pics

What year/how old was the LWHC? Haven't there been a few manufacturers over the years ? Does anyone know if the original models are better or worse ?
 
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