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Soo... Anon who just bought his first ice axes here.
Well I went and bought myself a nice pair of Grivel carmpons on ebay (BNIB £55, fuck yeah).
Problem is - as the only person I know with crampons I'm never gonna get to use 'em. So I thought fuck it, I'll spunk £15 on a pair of the cheap chinesse ones on ebay, and see what they're like. Pic related.
Anyone got any experience with em?
Obviously I'm more than prepared to throw 'em in the bin if they're total shite... But... Well, how bad can they ACTUALLY be? Hmm.
Considering it there are a few parts that can be shit and cause trouble.
1 - the main steel could be total shit. Ok, could be worse, it might bend and whatever, but there's a limit to how shit cheap pressed steel can be. If it can be pressed into a crampon shape, then it can't be brittle, that's for sure. If a spike bends, it can be bent back, or just ignored. It can be tweaked and played with to see what it's like and it'll probably be obvious if the steel is shit enough to kill ya on a hill.
2 - the flex bar steel could be total shit. This might cause more problems, as it needs to be spring steel (ie heat treated). I suppose if chinese exduct knives can preform well for $6 then there's proof china can produce heat treated steel incredibly cheap, but well, that's the part where a failure might give less warning. Not sure how to test that bit. Perhaps just flex it back and forth a few hundred times and look for signs of metal fatigue.
3 - the plastic the baskets are made of could be total shit. Hopefully this one will be obvious, but I suppose temperature has quite an effect on plastics so hmm. With a bit of luck any failure would be progressive enough to be spotted before it happens, or the plastic would be obviously shit and brittle on inspection, both at home and out in the temperatures they'll be used in. I suppose plastics are well enough developed that it wouldn't be hard to know what kind to use for a particular situation eh. Dunno.
cont.
