I commented this elsewhere also, but I'm gonna start its own thread, and get feedback from others.
I really have grown to love my modified shikars. I've got essentially the shikar FXD that allows me to rotate them for travel still. They originally came to me as rotating ones, and the bolts were shot from over tightening and wrenching on the locking nut. I replaced the bolts with grade 8 bolts from the hardware store and filed grooves into my standoffs with a flat chainsaw file. My top stick has replacement triangular knobs, which allows me to crank them tighter than the factory knobs. They fold super flat, and fit great inside of my jx3, but are way more stable and less wiggly than the regular rotating Shikars.
My feeling on this is that with the round knobs, and rotating standoffs you can only tighten them so much. The standoffs not having a groove to sit into, they tend to turn with little pressure, sometimes from setting the stick, sometimes from the weight of you climbing onto them. There were situations where I was climbing and the standoff would be almost vertical, which is one reason I quit using aiders on each of my sticks. Tricky to fix when hanging from an amsteel aider. They held, but not something I'd like to repeat.
I really have grown to love my modified shikars. I've got essentially the shikar FXD that allows me to rotate them for travel still. They originally came to me as rotating ones, and the bolts were shot from over tightening and wrenching on the locking nut. I replaced the bolts with grade 8 bolts from the hardware store and filed grooves into my standoffs with a flat chainsaw file. My top stick has replacement triangular knobs, which allows me to crank them tighter than the factory knobs. They fold super flat, and fit great inside of my jx3, but are way more stable and less wiggly than the regular rotating Shikars.
My feeling on this is that with the round knobs, and rotating standoffs you can only tighten them so much. The standoffs not having a groove to sit into, they tend to turn with little pressure, sometimes from setting the stick, sometimes from the weight of you climbing onto them. There were situations where I was climbing and the standoff would be almost vertical, which is one reason I quit using aiders on each of my sticks. Tricky to fix when hanging from an amsteel aider. They held, but not something I'd like to repeat.
