"But then you get reasonable priced items from no-name brands that might meet the specs, but nobody really knows, for all they can tell they might just just be unsafe junk just like the cheap stuff."
The need to overengineer things in the sport is quite interesting to me. I personally have tendency to use way more locking devices than my more experienced partners.
And I've replaced a lot of safe gear in my life just so my partners will feel safer.
To be honest, if someone shows up with a pile of mismatched draws and bootied cams I always feel way safer than when they show up with a nice shiny new rack.
One thing that's interesting to me is the difficulty of testing or inspecting things. I know plenty of people who find very old cordage or used gear in general to be sus.
I've tossed out plenty of two-decade old webbing and cordage that are perfectly fine and safe to use, just on the general principle that other folks might find it to be worrisome.
I also find most of the gear to be sanely priced; the reason the cheap stuff is cheap is because it skips an expensive certification process... so it's hard for me to call a $200 rope "overpriced". But then, I have a couple totems and was happy to pay what I had to pay for them.
What a lot of the discussion misses, and one thing I find super interesting, is that every time you climb you're dealing with used gear. And when you climb with a new partner you are often climbing on used gear of an unknown provenance.
The implication of this to me has always been that knowing how to inspect gear (and partners, HA!) and understanding all the real ways things go wrong is way more important and a much better use of my time than trying to get a deal from scoring un-branded gear.
My advice to folks is to read several editions of the AAC's yearly "Accidents in North American Climbing"-- that will tell you a whole lot (wear a helmet, back off sooner rather than later, be conservative when the stakes are higher, the gear itself is almost never the root cause).
The need to overengineer things in the sport is quite interesting to me. I personally have tendency to use way more locking devices than my more experienced partners.
And I've replaced a lot of safe gear in my life just so my partners will feel safer.
To be honest, if someone shows up with a pile of mismatched draws and bootied cams I always feel way safer than when they show up with a nice shiny new rack.
One thing that's interesting to me is the difficulty of testing or inspecting things. I know plenty of people who find very old cordage or used gear in general to be sus.
I've tossed out plenty of two-decade old webbing and cordage that are perfectly fine and safe to use, just on the general principle that other folks might find it to be worrisome.
I also find most of the gear to be sanely priced; the reason the cheap stuff is cheap is because it skips an expensive certification process... so it's hard for me to call a $200 rope "overpriced". But then, I have a couple totems and was happy to pay what I had to pay for them.
What a lot of the discussion misses, and one thing I find super interesting, is that every time you climb you're dealing with used gear. And when you climb with a new partner you are often climbing on used gear of an unknown provenance.
The implication of this to me has always been that knowing how to inspect gear (and partners, HA!) and understanding all the real ways things go wrong is way more important and a much better use of my time than trying to get a deal from scoring un-branded gear.
My advice to folks is to read several editions of the AAC's yearly "Accidents in North American Climbing"-- that will tell you a whole lot (wear a helmet, back off sooner rather than later, be conservative when the stakes are higher, the gear itself is almost never the root cause).