While we are on the subject of racks, I'll take the opportunity to share my rack collection and a few thoughts on each.
I borrowed a couple of racks from a friend a few years after I started caving and after trying them out at an indoor training venue, I instantly knew they were the descender for me. Next time I was in Inglesport, I bought the only rack they had, a Petzl.
https://www.inglesport.com/product/petzl-rack-descender/
It didn't take me long to realise that the long frame made free-handing re-belays incredibly difficult, despite the beautifully smooth descent, once you got going and the ability to use a double rope.
I took the rack in to my university engineering workshops, cut it off and threaded the ends of the frame, allowing it to be used inverted and reducing the overall length by about a third. After the original Petzl bars wore down too far, I machined new bars from mild steel in the engineering workshop and those bars are still on it now . My friends kindly christened this the "death rack".
This rack proved to be absolutely fantastic, it's short and great for technical SRT. The mild steel bars have excellent heat dissipation and I've never had issues with it overheating. The width of it allows it to be used with double ropes, which means you can do a pull through without a knot at the top and if managed right, this pretty much guarantees that it won't jam up when you pull through. I have one rope in each hand, running over the appropriate leg, keeping both down ropes completely separate for the entire descent, I then release the "back" rope and step away from the bottom of the pitch with the pull-down rope, so there is no chance that the ropes will come close to each other and twist together as can happen when they are joined by a knot at the middle, as is the case for a single rope descent pull-through. Just make sure to tie the bottom ends together before descending to prevent one running faster than the other and running off the end of one before reaching the bottom!
The only problem I've found with this rack is that because it is short, it needs a thin rope. Anything over 10.5mm is a real struggle to get down...
Next in my collection is the BMS Micro-Rack. This was a gift from an American caver who visited his wife's family in the UK every year and having seen my "death rack" the year before, brought an American rack for me next time he visited. being slightly longer than the "death rack", it is much better on a thicker rope, but being a rack, the bars are all free to move, so it's just as good on a thin rope. As stainless steel has poor heat dissipation, the bars are hollow, which seems to do the trick, but I do still wet my ropes before use and have never had issues with overheating. This became my rack of choice for everything except pull-through's, as being narrow, it can't be used on a double rope.
The great thing about the stainless steel is that it has excellent wear resistance and despite a lot of use on muddy ropes, the bars have very little sign of wear even after several years use.
One day however, while cleaning my kit, I noticed a hairline crack in the pin on the hyper-bar; on closer inspection, I realised that it was cracked right through. It struck me that this had created a knife-edge right next to the loaded rope and it wouldn't take much for this to slice right through the rope!
I'm not sure how it happened as I don't remember knocking it and I've not heard of this happenening to anyone else, so perhaps just a freak accident, but worth keeping an eye out for on any rack with a similar design:
My final rack is a Kong Rackong, purchased from
Starless River at Eurospeleo (though I notice Tony doesn't seem to stock them any more) as my MBS was out of service with the cracked pin at the time. To use, it's almost identical tot he BMS micro-rack and in that regard I'm very happy with it. The key difference is that the bars are aluminium (or alloy?) so better heat dissipation and hence solid not hollow, though this does not affect it's use. Despite this, I'll not be recommending it; the bars are so soft, I pretty much cut through them during the course of Eurospeleo. I've barely used it since, so the below is basically from one weeks caving:
If my "death rack" was about 10mm longer, or my BMS wide enough for a double rope, either would be pretty much perfect. As it is, I need to swap between them depending what I'm doing (which being Mendip based is pretty much no SRT at all for the last 2 years!).
Finally, here are the three together for a comparison on length. Not much in it, but you really notice it on a thicker rope!