Retiring Vertical Gear

[Stuart]

With well over 200 shafts dropped on my mine gear last year alone and 100's of hours spent on my ropes and harness I am starting to consider replacing some of my vertical gear. I am wondering what others opinions are as to when vertical gear should be retired and what gear I should consider replacing, keeping in mind that gear is quite expensive I want to replace as little as possible while remaining safe.

[Therrin]

I've been doing the same thing with some of my stuff Stuart.

I'm retiring one of my 200' ropes, as of last week or so. It's starting to look pretty haggardly and has been one of my main-use ropes for a while now. Same kinda thing.

For a lot of your gear, as long as you're checking it over for softspots, nicks, glazed areas, etc (the basic list of stuff) then it's usually good. But after using them for a while you start to feeeeeel like they're getting used up.
Once I reach the point I'm not sure about something anymore, even though it still checks out... I retire it to a dead rope. It's expensive yeah.. but it's not worth sweating it when you're hanging off it later and you've got that itch at the back of your brain that keeps you thinking about it.

Do you guys log your rope use?
At the place I used to work, we had to log the rope use, basically how many people were on it (how many times someone went up or down it).
After a certain point they were retired. There's also a max. time limit for overall age. I don't recall right now what it was.

Joanne and I were just discussing this on another thread, having to do with webbing, and while replacing webbing is considerably cheaper, it's still not really worth the risk to continue using dated lines just because new ones are expensive.

How about... you take pictures of your stuff and post it up and we can all look at it and see what we think? (grins)

Unfortunately, I had to retire on of my 100' lines after the last big Tecopa trip. One guy apparently doesn't "trust" things enough just to rappel like normal so he insists on using a backup prussik, but then he grabs onto it and goes flying down the line at mach 2 and glazed over huge sections of my rope. (fail)
I told him that in the future, if he doesn't think he can trust himself to descend like the rest of us, he can bring his own damn rope and ruin it instead of mine. (+ some other verbage)

I've got this CD made by Petzl which is a program that allows you to log all of your gear's information, date of manufacture, condition, use, falls sustained, etc.
It also has tutorials on checking hardware and measuring pieces for overly worn cams, plates, and other pieces.
It cost me a buck or two from Karstsports.com

[Stuart]

I was thinking of taking pictures and posting them up, but I decided not to because they look pretty worn. I completely agree on the webbing, It is very cheap and easy to replace. Luckily I have about twenty different lengths of webbing so they don't all get used every time.

As far as logging my rope use I can safely assume that I use every rope at-least twice a month with the exception being the 600' that only gets used about once a month.

I'll have to check out that CD from Petzl.

[TooeleCherokee]

Hey.. if you do retire your rope I have an Idea that needs used rope.. so if you want to get rid of your used rope send it my way

[Therrin]

It seems like our used ropes always end up being put to so many other useful things. I was always hounding the place I worked, for their "dead ropes", and had gotten several of them.
One day my boss was like "Ken, if you keep taking all our dead ropes we're not gonna have them around for the thousand things that we use them for here already!"

Rope. Handy stuff, even when it's used up.

[davantalus]

My most painful retirement was a beautiful new, bright orange, 7/16ths rescue line that was used to pull my buddy's car out of the mud. >:{