UKH

In reply to mike kann:

there was a thread/posting somewhere on here or linked from here i think about a rant against stainless pegs as they did not bite well and could work loose. He claimed to have puled out many by hand easily.

I dont know much about pegs etc (other than they rot - which is why i guess SS ones are favoured)

In reply to mike kann:
http://bolt-products.com/StainlessSteelPitons.htm

In reply to lithos: Hmm... I'm presuming that being in with the article photo's all will be revealed soon, but I'm bored lonely and inquisitive. Never a good combo

In reply to erikb56: Interesting Mester bond... thats one of them taken care of... what about the one with the evil looking barb?

In reply to mike kann: I'm no expert but I've had a look round the web and thrown in a bit of engineering knowledge. I assume ss pegs are used too often as they are too hard... I think other metals are used as they give a bit, and will deform into the crack. Won't ss pegs just shatter the rock?

I assume the criterea for pegs are, will deform into the crack so will seat well, but are strog enough to clip into (ie the head won't snap of after a fall).

Please someone correct me if I'm wrong... I haven't been able to google as much info as I would like.

In reply to mike kann:

That barbed one is interesting. As is the weird mix of welded round bar and forged sections.

My mate makes his own pegs, mostly stainless from angle sections (ground into knifeblades) or flat (bendy lost arrows) with a twist for the eye which he invariably makes too small to clip!

jk

In reply to mike kann:

Stainless pegs are hardly new. Trevor Peck used to make curved channel pegs in the 60's, and they were used for aid climbing.

Stainless tends to be a bit softer than cromolly, and were not as good for regular placing and removal, so fell out of favour with aid climbers.

As far as I can see the only potential use would be for belays on sea cliffs.

In reply to Lord of Starkness: Or any other fixed pegs such as the Wye Valley - tons of rusting manky old toss which needs attention at some point... I know they are not new - nothing thesedays ever is... just interesting.

In reply to Papillon:

Austenitic and duplex stainless steels are not particularly hard and have good formability as can be seen from the high levels of elongation. However, they do display considerable work hardening when (get stronger) when formed and this will tend to raise hardness.

In reply to Mick Ryan - UKClimbing.com: Tah for that - missed the headline... thinking about it the southwest could do with a mahoosive bag of these things...

In reply to Horse: Thanks... I was comparing them to this type

http://www.camp.it/EN/template01.aspx?codicemenu=70

but I see most of the others are made of NiCrMo steel, which is harder than say 316?

In reply to Papillon:

Doesn't really tell us much. It may well be a fully annealed and therefore soft steel to start with but it too will harden when deformed.

Not sure what they mean by NiCrMo steel, could be a stainless given that the principle alloy elements in austentic steels are Ni, Cr and in the case of 1.44xx Mo!

In reply to Horse:Found this

http://www.theuiaa.org/upload_area/cert_files/UIAA122_Pitons01-2004.pdf

so pitons are defined hard or soft, with specs for each. According to Needlesports the hard ones are for repeated use and the soft ones for permanent use.

My intrest comes from seeing lots of corroded brown pegs in Lancs quarries and similar, so I'm wondering if corrosion resistance is incompatible with a peg suitable for permanent placement.

In reply to Horse: I guess they would also become more brittle (prone to breaking)as a result of work hardening(?)

In reply to Chrispy:

No, certainly not stainless steel. There would be some loss of elongation (which is not the same as being brittle) but even work hardened stainless has very good elongation. If overloaded failure would remain ductile or tearing rather than a sudden crack and bang.

In reply to Papillon:

I would have thought so, hopefully Jim Titt will see this and make his views known. He has much better knowledge of forming these things and how they are used than I have.

In reply to mike kann:
The pegs in the pic are some samples that Jim (Titt) made to gauge the market for SS pitons, enough interest was shown for some to be put into his catalogue. The barbed ones show very high resistance to extraction but seemed too radical for the potential customers.
Jim's website (Bolt-products) is given above.

In reply to scott titt: I pressume you two are related and don't just share an unfortunate name They look very interesting... If I ever were allowed to help tidying up the local crags I might have to get some!

In reply to mike kann:

Yes, we are brothers: no, we do not share an "unfortunate" surname.

In reply to scott titt: I thought as much So is he just selling the ones shown on the site? I saw the single point curly whirly lower off... rather ingeneous!

In reply to mike kann:
At the moment its just the ones in the catalogue, if there is enough interest then other models could be added. Glad you like the "monster hooks", saves all that faffing/danger/risk at the top of sport routes.

In reply to mike kann:
Well Hi Chaps.

Mick, before you pull this thread, I´ll never make a penny from these and I only started working on stainless pegs because no one will make them. Any profits to the peg/bolt fund of your choice!

Here´s an answer to the rant about stainless pegs which I posted on the geek split fall thread for Mark Stevenson, with a few changes.
"Well. I´m not too convinced by this post (if it´s stainless pegs your interested in- the Think Pink bit was more for me because I did the 2nd or 3rd free ascent of this and there weren´t any bolts or staples then!) because I can´t imagine there are that many stainless pegs around that you can break so many in one climbing career, but there again who knows, maybe he falls off everything? Certainly in my life I´ve only seen two in place (apart from my own) and that was a long time ago. Maybe the O.P. is confused with chrome molybdenum?
Anyway, I´ve played with stainless pegs a bit and:-
The earliest ones I know of were from Trevor Peck, he was an aeronautical engineer from the S.W. and a pioneer climber. He started making nuts, the worst thing ever made, the Peck Cracker, and then pitons. These were a nice looking shallow channel with a single sided eye from 3 or 4mm stainless and at that time popular for sea cliffs. They were good in granite but not so special in limestone but certainly better than any soft steel stuff from Italy. The problem was as climbers moved over from body belays to Sticht plates the impacts got higher and the number of broken eyes increased. Up to this time no-one fell off anyway so they were rarely tested but styles changed and falls became more common.
The problem was the material he used had a pronounced grain and depending on which way from the sheet they were cut it was a question of whether the bottom of the eye sheared or the complete eye broke, I remember placing bets on which would happen on a first ascent with Tony Wilmott at Wyndcliffe.
Production stopped around 1975 and I bought up all the remaining stock I could find but what happened to them is lost in the mists of time.
In more modern times a series was produced by one of the Italian manufacturers (possibly Cassin) but soon dissapeared from the market.
More recently some appeared from Bulgaria which I know Pete Oxley was using, I looked into importing them but the company appears to have dissapeared (their website hasn´t been updated for some years and they don´t answer.) From the information I could find, scaling pictures and the price I can only think they perhaps were not quite the pinnacle of the engineering art but until I get one to try it´s hard to say. Certainly the eye material is far too thin from what I can judge.

Enough history- I´ve made and tested plenty of stainless pitons as I wanted to put them on the market but in a lot of ways they are really not quite perfect, the problem is that the usual grades of stainless lie at the top end of the hardness scale for "soft pitons" according to EN569 but well below the requirements for "hard". Because stainless cold works so easily, as you hammer them in they jump from soft to hard (well in between acrually) and for permanent placements and soft rock they don´t seem to work well.
I´ve tested in granite where you can really beat them in and then they are good and in medium rock they would probably also work well but in softish rock (limestone) they really aren´t very good. (I rested on a well driven one a few years ago and found out the hard way!)
Channels need to be at least 3 or preferably 4mm materialotherwise they collapse anyway, one of the doubts with the Bulgarian ones which are from 2mm. The pegs from Peck were a shallow channel and the legs just folded out, not bridging across, and being stainless immediately work hardened and so didn´t really spring back and hold well.
BUT! There are things one can do, by using the more ductile variants of the common alloys (316) and annealing it´s possible to get reasonably into the "soft" region which is what I do with my current series, of course to made super hard springy pegs is quite easy but for permanent placements this isn´t what one wants.
Of course there are other possible approaches. As Pit Schubert, the German mountain safety guru said:- "Pitons are medieval". Just beating a spike in the rock and expecting it to hold decades later certainly is optimistic and so you need an active piton, something that uses a bit more than just friction to hold it in.
I´ve got a box of ideas I tried and in the end produced a "magic" piton which held 18kN straight-out pull in a completely parallel crack (cut with a diamond cutter). In fact my theoretical analysis gives around 40kN pull-out resistance in the right conditions. Unfortunately the market is small and my customer surveys were negative- "it doesnt´t look anything like a piton so it´s no good" sort of thing so I shelved the project for something with a better return."

The "barbed" piton uses the two legs as an incredibly powerful spring, as you hammer it in, the barbs curved underside forces the legs out and they give around 1500-2000kg force on the barb which very effectively resists removal.
The others are plasma cut from 316Ti hot rolled angle and then forged and ground. The annealing is a bit of a pain but otherwise they are just a bit too hard to form into cracks nicely.

In reply to jimtitt:

Thanks Jim.... I've been curious over this. There's a few people suugesting ss pegs for repegging, but I'm not sure they are that clued up over their suitability.

In reply to Mick Ryan - UKClimbing.com: I am sure you have considered Titanium as well? I know they are reknowned for folding when thin, but would a channel peg made from it be suitable? It doesn't work harden like SS and has the spring to it... maybe could be an alternative solution? Quite how you'd form them I don't know, but I'm sure its possible. I guess price would be the issue?

In reply to mike kann:

I am not sure it doesn't work harden. Anyway see this:

http://www.ushba.com/catalog/rock.html#alpine pitons

In reply to Horse:

Hmmm

That answers a question as to what the strange very light and shiny wedge peg might have been, that I found on Teatime Crag in Wadi Bih (UAE / Oman border) around 1996. It looked like one of the Ural-Alp wedges.

What it was doing there, about 5 metres up, on relatively easy (4a max)moves above a nice gravel landing, is a mystery. I was able to solo up to it, and remove it quite easily with a couple of taps using a small stone. There was no tat or krab on it when I found it, and was no evidence of any previous climbing on the crag at that time, nor any other pegs of that type found in the UAE.

It's still somewhere in the region -- though for the life of me I can't remember which crag I left it on as a belay or to back up an ab point!

In reply to Horse: I knew about those but I'm not sure if there is a titanium channel peg out there...

In reply to mike kann:
I had a look at titanium on behalf of a few people, like most metals these days you can alloy it to get almost any characterictic you want. Pure it is very soft and also fairly weak, as you bring the hardness up and strength up to the levels we would want it tends to start getting brittle and shockingly expensive. To get up to the strength of "normal" stainless alloys you are right on the top of what is available in titanium, in fact the only standard titanium grade which is as strong as any stainless is grade 5. Titanium is light and extremely corrosion resistant but not really the thing for beating into cracks!
If springy pegs are what´s wanted there are enough spring grades of stainless available, after all that´s what the springs in climbing gear are made from but for permanent placements one normally is looking for soft pegs. The problem as ever is going to be the limited market and the tooling costs.
The tale of Ushba is long and sometimes interesting, involving Russian "free enterprise", however they where taken over in 2004 and their products are still advertised but not available.

In reply to Mick Ryan - UKClimbing.com:
Point taken., though I didn´t start the thread. I´ll sign up for a commercial profile in the morning, is that o.k?
Jim

In reply to jimtitt:



I'm curious, what was this? I'm guessing opposing barbs from something springy and fairly hard?

feel free to PM me if you are worried about your reply being considered commercial.

Tom B