In reply to CurlyStevo:
> I'd like them to have tested brand new slings stored for 10 years. Also I felt little use was hard to define and is a subjective measure.
Agreed.
The importance they give to age as a marker in balance with use and condition without making more effort in quantifying the later is misleading, specially when there's a perfectly logical reason of why dyneema slings seem to loose strength 'faster' than nylon.
It's just that with dyneema being a stronger material the sling is composed of less fibres to achieve the same strength when new. The other side of the coin is that for each single damaged fibre a bigger percentage of strength is lost, . So if we conjure some round numbers for an example:
A single Nylon fibre takes 10grams, so you weave together 1000 fibres and you end up with a webbing that takes 10kgs.
A single dyneema fibre takes 100g, so you weave 100 fibres and you get a 10kg webbing.
Now you cut 1 fibre from each, and the nylon webbing will have lost 10g of its strength, so that's a 0.1% loss, whereas the dyneema webbing will have lost 100g of its strength, which is 1%. So every time you rub a sling across the rock those fibers you damage have a bigger impact if it's dyneema than nylon.
Dyneema is actually much more stable than nylon and most other man made fibres, and were age by itself be a factor, any strength loss would be less than that of nylon.
And for a bit of trivia, dyneema actually gets stronger with use/aging and even more so when being loaded hard. The more you load it the stronger it gets. Not much benefit when the sling looks like it's sporting an afro though