The safety element comes with a trade-off – it doesn’t feed slack to the climber very well and when we pulled out slack quickly it had a tendency to lock-up, hindering the climbing process. Lowering a climber felt effortless and totally controlled – mainly due to the long thumb lever where one can really tweak the angle with precision. While safety is all about how you use it – it just felt almost impossible to drop a climber regardless of technique or experience. It also felt like the safest for beginners with a fairly aggressive assisted-lock. This is by far the cheapest of the three devices. Instead, we focused on the devices that followed the classic tubular style. We don’t have much experience with Gri-gri belaying as we controversially believe it isn’t intuitive, so we omitted the Birdie from our process. That being said, the Birdie is cheaper and performed really well. The Birdie seemed to be very similar to the classic auto-locking Gri-Gri which has been around for 30 years without much competition. We both have a Mammut 10mm rope, a classic workhorse.Ĭoming from using an ATC which we both feel is more intuitive, we were more interested in testing the Mega Jul, Smart and Pilot. We currently use a Black Diamond ATC Guide, so we are comfortable with tubular devices. We have been climbing for about 2 years so we are relative newbies – we are mainly focused on outdoor sport climbing. These devices were the Edelrid Mega Jul, Black Diamond ATC Pilot, Mammut Smart and we also tried the auto-locking Beal Birdie. Wanting to be as informed as possible we asked if we could try all the new devices that the CityRock gear shop sold. With the new Edelrid Mega Jul there are now three tubular assisted devices to choose from at the CityRock gear shop, so what better time could there be to do a roundup. Gambling Casinos tell us that “winners know when to stop”, and when you hit your mid-twenties, assisted braking devices start to look like a good idea. We have never “written up” anything before so don’t judge us too hard!Īh, the good old (bug, tube, etc) – it’s classic, dependable, and totally prone to error. We are relative novices and don’t have a mountaineering/trad background, so this is more geared at other newbies looking at getting an auto-lock device for the first time. Myself and buddy Andre were comparing some of the new devices, and saw others had the same questions – so we put together a little comparison to help out. Review by Fabian Humphry and Andrè le Roux CityROCK loved this review found in the forum, so we’ve posted it here for you to enjoy!
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