Climbing Anchor Project
OVERVIEW
Since I was allowed to choose exactly what kind of final project I wanted to do for Mechanics Lab, I knew I wanted to do something applicable to my life. As one of my hobbies is rock climbing, and I am often in a situation where I have to build my own anchor outdoors, I decided I wanted to study the maximum tensile strength that different climbing anchors provide. Below is a picture of me using a quad anchor I built at the top of an over 100ft climb!
A few different kinds of anchors are used in different situations, and most of the knowledge of which one is the strongest in a given situation is simply knowledge passed from one climber to another by word of mouth. Furthermore, after doing some research, there weren’t any all-encompassing studies on the exact numerical tensile strength of these different kinds of anchors, making this project novel and then new information valuable.
The four different anchors I decided to test are seen below:
It was predicted that the quad would be the strongest and the American Death Triangle would be the weakest.
There are a few main traits that a good climbing anchor should have and they are described by the acronym SERENE. The quad encompasses these requirements the best and therefore is predicted to have the highest ultimate strength.
In order to conduct this experiment, a custom-made plate setup had to be mounted onto the machine. This plate had two bolts attached to it to simulate the bolts that would be attached at the top of a sport climbing route.
The experiment was tested with two kinds of rope. One rope was a lot thicker and had a higher stated maximum strength. We wanted to make sure that we were able to get failure tests from all 4 of the anchors and it was predicted that the strength and elongation of some of the anchors with the stronger rope simply might not break. Some pictures from the trials can be seen below.
Stronger Rope
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Weaker Rope
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The results of the overall anchors can be seen below:
Some main conclusions were drawn:
