- Joined
- Jan 17, 2019
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- 6,284
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.