Belay devices

    The first step to learning to climb on your own is learning to belay.  Well this post won’t necessarily teach you how to belay but hopefully by the end you may know a little about the equipment used to do it. 

            The first and most basic belay device is in fact, no belay device at all.  This is called the hip belay.  It is the oldest way to belay, however it is not the safest.  This type of belaying is used when the climbing routs are easy and a quick belay is necessarily.  The belay is done by simply feeding the rope behind you.  In the event that the climber slips or fails, the friction between you and the rope is that locks the rope.

            A Sticht plate is one of the oldest known belaying devices.  It is the simplest of all the devices and is probably the cheapest.  It consists of a plate of metal with a slot cut in the middle of it.  Rope is fed through the slot and down through a spring.  The rope then goes under a carabineer and back up and out of the plate.  The rope locked off by pulling the trailing end down to your hip.  This put a “bite” in the rope and prevents it from sliding back through the plate. 

             The ATC is perhaps the most common of all belay devices.  It stems from the Sticht Plate; it is just greatly improved upon.  As shown below, the device has two slots and a piece of wire going from one side of the device to the other.  This wire is what holds the device to the belay harness.  To use this device the rope needs to be pinched and pushed into one of the slots just as in figure one.  Then the device is clipped into the harness on a locking carabineer as in figure two.  Now the device is safely attached, how to break with the device is shown in figure three.  There are many variations of this belay device, these include the Variable controller; this has one side that is angled and thicker so that it may apply more friction which is useful when using smaller diameter ropes. 

Figure one

Figure two

Figure three

The next device is a figure eight device.  Though this is technically a defined as a belaying device used in climbing, nine times out of ten it is used for rappelling.  This device gets its name from its shape; it looks like the number “8”.  The rope may be fed through the device in two different ways.  The first way is up through the big hole, then down and behind the device then back up the big hole following the way that the original path of the rope.  The second and safer way is slightly different.  The beginning is still the same, come up through the big hole however this time instead of going behind the device, go through the locking carabineer, then back down through the big hole.  Feeding the rope through this way prevents the rope from sliding down off of the belay device when an excessive amount of slack is in the rope.  This would be extremely dangerous if the climber fell at this point because it is nearly impossible to catch them by locking off the rope.  They will fall and you will get a rope burn that you will not forget (the rope burn is only in the event that you are not wearing gloves).  A variation of this belay device is the rescue figure eight.  It is the same as the regular figure eight however it has wings that come off the sides to create extra friction and they stop the rope from sliding off of the device.

Figure eight

Rescue figure eight