diggerdog adam said:
Rock Doc, i think that you might have mistaken what i meant
I was refering to a pull through trip ! ie the tail end of the rope must be able to run freely through the hanger if you go over the top with the shrink tube it WILL JAM and you will be forced to use a backup rope for proceeding pitches !
But maybe the way you rig is different to mine !
Probably not much different.
I understood that you were talking about pull through trips. But I can't think of any occasion when I had a rope jam in the belay on a through trip because of the "stiff bit" due to the rope marker. The normal cause of rope jamming was when the person feeding the rope back up the pitch was inattentive and let a bundle of tangled rope go up the way, where it would snag, jam, whatever. And I remember one particularly gibbery afternoon in Swinsto ... climbing back up the jammed rope on the upper of the 2 big pitches. Ugggh!
Now, things may have changed with these P-bolt thingies, but when I've bothered looking at them they appear to be well placed. So I don't see where the problem is going to come from with the heat-shrink over-bind method of marking. Assuming that you've de-tangled the rope as it's going up, and there's no great piss-flaps of tattered heat-shrink on the rope, it'll be pulled into the hole of your P-bolt just as well as it'll find the hole in the stack of abseil slings the way it did in times past.
How are you talking about heat-shrinking your markers?
The method we used when I was takle master at the university club was a 5cm band of shrink on the bare rope, then the slip of paper with the PENCIL rope details on it, then a 9cm length of heat shrink over that, and a 15 cm disposable layer of heat shrink over that to take day-to-day wear. You apply each layer of shrink separately, of course.
With everything more-or-less symmetrical and a 5cm tail of bare rope you'd use maybe a foot at each end of the rope, which is negligible in the real world. If the top layer of shrink got tatty down the hole, you dig out a knife from your pocket and cut the offending tat off. Then during the week you replace the top layer of heatshrink (in reality, you leave it for the tackle master to do it, after he's washed all the ropes, dried them, inspected them and bitched to the rest of the club that no-one helps him with maintenance.).
The whole lot leaves a smoothly tapered stiffened section of rope at the end which we always found would slide round naturals and through most "fixed aids" without hang-ups.
diggerdog adam said:
Sorry Rock Doc, I forgot to welcome you to the forum !
Ohhh, it feels just like the bar of the Brass Cat (friendly, but full of BPC). <G>
'Scuse me - MWD's coming to surface. Off to earn the pennies.
