|
Some day we climbers may wear special gloves and shoes enabling us to scale blank walls like spiders. Should we fall off, like spiders our body harnesses may instantly attach safety lines to the rock. If and when inventors develop this technology, we will no doubt consider it clever but climbing wouldn't be as exciting as before. But for now, none of us can envision the details.
And so it was with the Friends 25 years ago when Ray Jardine was inventing them. The need was apparent, at least to him, but the actual configuration was elusive to everyone.
Seeking a device that would anchor itself in a crack, and hold with greater power the harder the pull, he began the inventive process in 1971 with a dual sliding wedge design. Taking advantage of his aerospace engineering background he analysed this configuration and found it mathematically unsound. The internal friction between any kind of wedges reduce their holding power, and in many situations such a device could pull out. He was inventing for his own use, and was not about to increase safety.
The summer of 1973 Mike Lowe tried to sell Ray a few of his new Cam Nuts, which he said his brother Greg had invented. They worked, he explained, on the principle of the constant angle cam. Intuitively Ray Jardine saw that the concept was viable, and felt that here might be the idea he had been looking for. He bought three of them. Unfortunately the first time he used them all three flipped out and went sliding down the rope into his belayer\'s arms, leaving me running out a 5.9 fist crack unprotected. That was also the last time he used them.
The constant angle spiral is ubiquitous in Nature, from seashells and pinecones to swirling barometric pressure gradients and the great spiral nebulas. Really, it is just an expression of uniform growth. Descartes described the principle mathematically in 1638, calling it the equiangular spiral. Since then, constant angle cams have been used in uncountable mechanical devices. He doesn\'t know where Greg got his idea of applying the concept to a crack anchoring device. Perhaps it was from the Jumar ascender, which uses a more-or-less constant angle cam to clinch the rope. At any rate we have Greg to thank for introducing the concept to crack anchoring technology.
Configuring a workable device, however, proved to be an enormous task. In retrospect it took someone with aerospace engineering skills, a questing mind coupled with extreme motivation and a passion for climbing - something of a rare combination perhaps. For months Ray worked in Bill Forrest\'s machine shop building camming prototypes, testing them at the local crags and innovating design improvements in the evenings at home. In the end he filled a couple of sizable boxes with discarded prototypes.
Many of these designs were later backwards engineered on the basis of Friends by other companies, and are in production today. This despite the fact that he found and discarded them. For after all, he did not have to compete with himself, and therefore he had the luxury of moving beyond inferior designs.
Then one day after trying absolutely everything he could think of, and continually straining his mind for ever more ideas, the Creator enlightened him with the concept of a double set of opposing and independently spring loaded cams. Like wheels of a car having independent suspension, each of these cams would be able to adjust to widely varying surface irregularities, within limits of course. He put one of these \"quads\" together and took it to the crags for testing. The cams were spring loaded against each-other, and they were held together with a high-tensile steel bolt. But the bolt was wrapped with a piece of ordinary strap iron as a stem, and of course the device lacked any kind of trigger. On a 5.8 route which he called Fantasia, located at Split Rocks, he climbed to a stance where he could almost let go with both hands, and managed to squiggle the Quad into a hand-sized crack. By the way it behaved he knew instantly that it was the solution to the problem he had been working on all that time.
The following spring, 1974, Ray Jardine took his first set of working prototype Friends to Yosemite and climbed dozens of difficult routes with them. These units were rough hewn and extremely limited by today\'s standards, and he had only a few 2-1/2's and 3-1/2\'s. But they certainly proved their worth, and at season\'s end three climbers, Ray included, used them in an attempt to climb the Nose in a day. Three hours of downpour late that afternoon immobilized them beneath the Great Roof and forced a bivouac at Camp V. But they did finish in 28 hours total climbing time, and managed to cut the previous three-day record in half.
For the next six years he continued making improved prototypes. His focus was not in their commercial application, but on the literally thousands of routes he used them on, mostly in Yosemite. His partners were limited in number and \"sworn to secrecy\" because he felt a little paranoid about the idea being ripped off by some manufacturer. Meanwhile, he certainly did give the Lowe brothers plenty of time to introduce workable camming devices of their own invention, which they did not.
In 1977 Mark Vallance invited Ray to the UK to help him start manufacturing Friends. Mark is a highly dedicated and gifted individual, and was the first person to foresee the widespread appeal of Friends. Friend marketability is obvious now, but it certainly was not then, and Mark was the visionary who made it happen. The next year Mark founded Wild Country and started selling Friends.
What does Ray Jardine think of today\'s preponderance of Friend look-alikes and so-called improvements? First, he feels that a certain amount of it is blatantly inferior. In the same vein that people would not go to quacks for brain surgery, climbers would be unwise to entrust their lives to cheap Friend imitations made of inferior materials. If you have something like this on your rack, you might consider getting rid of it. Secondly, there are all sorts of gizmos out there which, in my mind at least, are theoretically unsound. Three cam units are one example. Analogously, three wheeled vehicles were banned from the marketplace years ago because of their inherent instability. Many other gizmos out there are mathematically unsafe, and he certainly would not bet his life on them! Thirdly, there are a number of so-called improvements which in reality are nothing but patent work-arounds. He suspects that they will fade from vogue over time - meanwhile we might be aware of the hype. And lastly, now that the Friend patents are expiring we are seeing virtual-copies by major manufacturers.
|
