Harken Ninja: Long term review and some experiments

[AlexR]

Evening all,

as promised here is another esoteric (for caving) gear review, the Harken Ninja foot ascender.

I got this thing about 3 years ago or so as curiosity coincided with a decent overtime payout, so I thought "What the hell, give it a try".

In short, it's clunkier and significantly more expensive than any other foot ascender. It is phenomenally good at grabbing even the skinniest rope at the start of a pitch. The webbing on mine is absolute rubbish and the adjustment (tightening) infuriatingly stiff. Kicking it off the rope is as easy or easier than a Pantin once you get the rolling motion right. When you do, it's a lot more reliable than the good old "kicking someone standing behind you in the groin" Pantin move. Leaving aside the webbing, I'd expect it to last much longer than a Pantin.
Even though I eye the hook with suspicion, it's so far not gotten snagged on anything.

It's been down a deep alpine cave once, which gets very muddy at the bottom. Muddier than anything in Derbyshire - yes, really. It performed as well (or rather poorly) as a Petzl Pantin under identical circumstances. I had assumed the very low spring tension and generally more open shape would make it worse. It stopped working at about the same point, presumably because only one side needs to be operational for the device to function. In reality, once it gets properly muddy no foot ascender will work. It was, however, even more annoying to clean to restore functionality than a Pantin.

I find that after more than 500m or so of SRT a "new style" pantin tends to dig into my foot, the Ninja's bigger size made it more comfortable in that regard. But there's much cheaper ways of achieving this.

After a couple more trips in the UK the webbing started to look like it wasn't long for this world; it's worse than the picture above makes it look, which has seen maybe 1km. So I promised myself I'd sort it soon and put it in a drawer.
Would you believe it, only 2 years later it reemerged for this little photoshoot. After cutting off the webbing I wondered if it could be turned into a reasonably safe hand ascender, mainly because it works well on 5mm Dyneema without shredding it.
So I wasted a pleasant hour or two bending some stainless steel wire and fixing it onto the ascender. When you press on the top wire loop you rotate the wire out of the way, but in use the large hook keeps it in place. I needn't have bothered, as shortly after I realised the rope can also be rotated out from the bottom and the device is unsafe as a hand ascender even by my standards.
The good folks at Harken no doubt reached the same conclusion, slapped a face plate and a £200 price tag on it and the Harken Ninja MultiAscend was born.

No doubt the mug who forked out for the Skylotec Spark and the Ninja foot ascender will soon give Harken more money - at least they decided to play to their strengths and eliminate all webbing from their next caving-relevant product.

Ah yes, webbing - I did end up doing Harkens job for them and slap some Dyneema on the foot ascender, let's see how long it lasts.