DIY Climbing Gear - Nuts Edition

As I mentioned in another blogpost, I learned to lead this year - and I learned to place trad gear this summer. I enjoy learning how gear works, and one of the best ways to do that is to reverse-engineer it!

This project is still WIP and i will be adding more to this blog in the future.

For now, I decided to start by making my own passive protection -- specifically nuts.

Moreover, I wanted to get away with only using materials that I already had available -- so the total budget for this project was $0.

I decided I will do better than the OG nuts -- actual slung machine nuts... (source: reddit)

I was interning at Sharkninja this summer, so I was far from MIT campus and thus didn't have access to the nice machine shops on campus. Luckily, Austin has a machine shop in his garage -- fully manual with no DRO :D

I referenced existing gear and free handed all of the curved faces of the nuts, and filed away the rough edges.

Can you tell which nuts are homemade? Hint: look for the blue shrinkwrap. (6061-T6 Aluminum)

For the wire nuts, I used extra steel wire from McMaster and swages. To build confidence in my swages, I tested the cable+swage on instron for up to 5kN -- it didn't even start yielding. Yay, this means that on the actual nuts, where the strands are doubled, the rating should be at least 10 kN -- in line with the store bought nuts.

Dogbone of the steel wire with two swaged loops, loaded onto the Instron.

Next, I am working on:

- making nuts faster on a manual mill (primarily by using custom jigs and 5deg endmill instead of doing custom curves)

- considering making offsets and other more exotic passive protection for climbing.

- making fun miniature nut keychains (micronuts) for friends and family.

and more!