Surprise! Link Cam Review
By Dingus Milktoast

We put a lot of stock in first impressions don’t we? In the world of business, on first dates, tasting some weird ice cream, first impressions are often a make or break situation. And yet… we all know that often enough, first impressions can be deceiving.

When I first became aware of Link Cams from Omega Pacific, I must admit I did not have a positive impression. In fact I literally thought, “there’s someone’s college design project gone wild.” It almost seemed like a 3-bladed razor, ya know? To be quickly superseded by a 4-bladed one, then 5. A marketing ploy if you will.

Know what I found out? Those 5-bladed razors work pretty damn good! Best shave ever, I almost hate to admit it; so much for first impressions. I own two 5-bladed razors now, one for home, one for travel. 3-blades? Bah! Stone age sheet!

When my new Link Cams showed up in the mail I took a hard look at them. The first of several surprises; I expected well-made. Omega Pacific makes good gear after all. But just looking at them, hefting them, working the trigger, they feel exceptionally well-made, like a fine watch or a sturdy clock. No slop in the throw, no hitches as the cams retracted, smooth as butter in fact, but with a solid, Mercedes-sort of feel.

The trigger assembly is very well designed too. I like the trigger wire material itself, never seen anything quite like it. The swivel points on the attachments make them very smooth too. I reckon the X-pattern increases the throw, very necessary considering how far the cams have to travel.

Further, the intricate shapes of the cams are a thing to behold. Watch the interaction of the lobes as the cams retract, it’s quite beautiful. I subsequently learned the design is based on a patented Greg Lowe concept. It seems wonderfully executed, reminds me of the multiple jaws coming out of that Alien creature in the SciFi movie.

I purposely avoided all available literature prior to my using the cams. I didn’t even read the user’s manual, sorry god. I wanted to evaluate them ‘untainted’ by the opinions of others. I avoided spec sheets, marketing claims and the opinions of other reviewers and testers. You’re getting my unbiased bullshit here.

I also wanted to solicit the opinions of my partners. I didn’t talk them up either, for the same reasons. I wanted their untainted opinions. I just asked them to try em out.

Rack-em up, they hang like Camelots. The gold one is the same outer size as a gold Camelot too, for reference purposes. That had to be on purpose and good for them, Goldilocks, as we like to call the gold Camelot, is a time-honored 3-generation standard for many folks, that great hand crack piece eh? Hang about the same length too.

When you try to grab one off the rack, the distance between thumb and trigger fingers takes some getting used to. I have big hands and I still had to open my hand pretty wide to ‘get at em.’ Specially the gold one. Also, I sometimes had difficulty getting my thumb though the webbing loop to push against the trigger. I think the flange on the end of the stem could stand to be just a tiny bit wider, to hold the webbing a little bit more open.

They are heavier than other cams, no getting around that. They’re especially top-heavy, so to speak. A floppier stem would have them floppin around all over the place. The stem seems *just stiff enough* to keep it from happening though. Still flexible for all that.

Place em, ohjeez these babies are out of this world! Within their size range they seem to fit almost any crack configuration, from flairs to pods. Those dreaded thin cracks that expand as they get deeper? SLAIN! Offset crack? DONE! Hand to finger potential? ONE PIECE. Flair? We don’t care bout no stinkin FLAIRS!

I commented to Angus after a my first lead up a nice finger and hand crack,

“This is the All-Time Panic Piece” Angus.” Seriously, you can rip one of these bad boys off the rack and slam in that hand to finger crack and pretty much expect the thing to find its own home. Keep the trigger pulled and drag it down the crack, presto it will stick somewhere!

Couldn’t get them irretrievably stuck either and I tried. Now I’m sure some rock and some cracks will snag them, but on the bullet-hard volcanic cracks I was climbing, full of inner rugosities and tenuous warts, I failed to put them in a position of no return.

Also, when you do get a good deep placement, you often also get an enormous cam surface contact, far more than with any other cam I ever saw or imagined. Its mind boggling, the more narrow and deeper you place them the more cam surface there is to catch. If the piece starts to pull, it has all that surface contact to resist and adjust.

I don’t know how these things behave in a hard fall, didn’t take any. Funked em pretty good but took no serious falls. We used them in flint-hard columnar volcanic cracks and in textured and sometimes grainy alpine granite.

I was totally surprised! I went from ‘marketing gimmick’ to GENIUS! On one crack lead, blew me away! My partners put em to use and had similar comments, observations and surprise. Each of them expressed doubt, till he used them. Then they were all,
“Chyaaaaaaaaaahhh!” Seriously, they were.

Angus placed two of them on his ballsy first ascent of Crack-a-dile Hunter, both flaired granite pods where no other piece would fit. Scuffy used them a couple of times, again in places where no other cam had a hope of fitting. Miwok slammed in a few as well. The main point with all three men, each having climbed more than 20 years, is that when these pieces were on the rack? They got used, inevitably. And they received good marks in the process.

Design features touted by Omega Pacific include the greatest expansion range of any cams on the market, constant cam angle throughout, full-strength holding power, a unique trigger wire arrangement including the ‘swivet’ attachments and cross-cabling.

Omega Pacific cites several benefits of these features including increased surface contact in small sizes, reduced tendency to walk, offset capability, less time to find the right piece, and the crack-jumaring already mentioned.

So as you can see, my untainted observations matched up almost point-for-point with the marketing hype. Definitely not hype in my opinion, these Link Cams, from Omega Pacific. I think they rock.

I see many of the same potential roles as suggested by OP too. Crack jumaring, check. They were BORN for crack jumaring. Supplement a single rack of cams, instead of taking halves of the next set, take two Links and one larger one and yer prolly good2go. Might take 5 or 6 additional pieces otherwise. I can totally see them augmenting a rack of hexes for the great alpine rack… hexes for lead pro, cams for the belays, or whatever.

I figured they’d end up in the bottom of my aid box, to be blunt. Little did I know, they ended up on my primary lead rack, lol. And like I said to Angus, they are the All-Time Panic Piece, best ever in that category. Since I climb scairt a lot I should know.

Now if you’re one of those list-makers (you know who you are… you checked it on the master after all), my review will leave you feeling less than satisfied. You’ll be wantin numbers bygawd, charts and shit. Done tole yall, I don’t do lists. You wanna compare specs, sorry, I’m not doing your OCD for you.

Infer your own list conclusions. Or better yet, just try em out yourselves. BTW, I never did compare their strength to the competition, or size-range to size-range. I’m an analog climber damnit. They seem strong enough to me and I know they have a wide expansion range, know that for a fact. Why fret numbers (cept the $$$, they aren’t cheap) I’ll promptly forget anyway? I don’t really get my bowels in an uproar over that end of the bidness.

But you can do it yourselves here… easy as pie.

http://www.omegapac.com/op_products_linkcams.html

Enjoy mates!
Cheers,
DMT

[size=12][b]Full Disclosure: The company that manufactured this equipment provided it free of charge to RC.com and RC.com then provided it as compensation to the reviewer for his or her review. This company does not currently advertise on RC.com.[/b]

Did you ever have a love affair with a piece of hardware? Wait a minute, you’re reading a gear review. Of COURSE you’ve had a love affair with a piece of hardware! What was I thinking? We always remember that first affair too, don’t we?

I acquired my first Metolius TCUs almost 20 years ago. Up to that time rigid stem Friends were pretty much the only game in town. The TCU was aimed squarely at the niche where Friends fared poorly, small cracks and horizontals. As soon as I saw them, I had to have them.

OMG, what a huge difference they made! Strong, compact, versatile, the 4 smallest units found a home on my rack immediately. And they stayed there. Other small pro came and went, but when headed up thin cracks I wanted those Metolius TCUs. I’d sneak em onto my bud’s rack when he wasn’t looking. He was a Wired Bliss man and sorta fickle about it, so I had to be sneaky.

You have to go back to the early 80’s; Smith Rock, Oregon country, prior to the sport climbing revolution, which was just getting started. Coursing full grown from an artesian spring, the Metolius River taps the deep aquifers of the Cascade Range and flows past the tiny village of Camp Sherman. That’s where Doug Phillips lived.

Doug invented Sliders and started Metolius working out of his two-bay garage. He hired and taught Steve Byrne to work with silver soldering. Friends hit the market big time right about then and everyone was looking for cams that would fill the gap below the #1 Friend.

From their collaboration the TCU was born, a stable 3-cam, U-shaped cable stem unit that would revolutionize small crack climbing protection in the same way the Friend did for larger cracks. I bought my first orange TCU in 85 or 86. That very same orange TCU is still on my back up rack as I type these words.

This year Metolius introduces their new Ultralight series; TCUs, Power and Fat Ultralights. I have been actively field testing them for the past couple of months. If I could summarize my findings with one work, it would have to be SWEET.[/size]

[img]http://photos.rockclimbing.com/photos//673/67388.jpg[/img]

[size=12]Let’s establish this: I’m no engineer, nor do I evaluate climbing gear for a living. See the professionals for such tech data. Me? I’m a climber and a writer, and this review is written with inherent bias. I like these cams a lot, no, I love them and I would like to tell you why.

Feel - when you pick up and hold a TCU or Power Cam, it just seems to fall right into your hand. It is solidly built, with no slop in the design or the manufacture. Pull the trigger; its buttery smooth and offers very tight control over the individual cams. The cam lobes rotate as if they sported di-lithium crystals in the bearings.

Durability – might as well be a trademark of Metolius hardware in general! Face it, their stuff is built to last. Their cams have proven themselves time and again in the field, on the racks, over the years, over and over. The design works, the materials hold up. Trigger wires, the bane of many a contender, just seem to hold up with minimal or no maintenance at all. Aid, free, bounce testing, aggressive cleaning, stuffed into the bottom of a pack; they hold up to the abuse.

Utility – work horse pieces. Many a trad rack is formed on a backbone of TCUs and Power or Fat Cams. They offer superior holding power and excellent expansion ranges. They’re not so long as to dangle at your knees and not so short they are overly difficult to clean. Across the models they work in most kinds of rock.

I love TCUs for pin scars for example, the way the center cam is free to rotate. I can remember individual cam placements where a Metolius is the only piece that will work. They’re like old buddies, when they meet up, placement and cam!

So the Ultralights? All that, and less. They should consider a tag line for the upcoming Metolius Superbowl commercials:

The Ultralights are ultra light. They may be the lightest FULL RACK of cams on the market. Piece for piece, they are as strong as any competitor and as light, or lighter. When you pick one up, it feels like your hand actually gets LIGHTER. I know, I’m getting carried away, but go pick one up, you’ll see.

Some modern cams surrender weight by shortening the length of the cam. Metolius tried this in some prototypes, but field tests confirmed suspicions. Really short cams are hard to place and even harder to clean, especially in the small sizes. The Ultralights are the same length as their predecessors.

Metolius reengineered the axle design, incorporating what they call DAT, Direct Axle Technology. Gone are the heavier (and wider) axle end-caps of the older design. Instead, the cable stem is attached directly through holes in the axle. Especially in the small sizes, the end caps of the old design could get in the way, cause the piece to bottom out in shallow placements, inhibit rotation or even help the cams to walk, or not engage at all.[/size]

[img]http://photos.rockclimbing.com/photos//673/67389.jpg[/img]

[i]DAT in all its glorious, vivid detail. [/i]

[size=12]DAT eliminates that bulk. You can see the cams better, and there is less restriction in tight placements. Other features include the Range Finder color-coded dots. At first annoying to this old schooler as a marketing ploy, I think they’re a really cool reminder of the optimal placement range. I can use all the reminders I can lay my mind on these days.

So how does all this translate to the rock? Well, I have the lightest full-service rack I have ever carried in my career. I can deploy about 12 cams, with individual biners, for about the same weight as 8 in the past, or even 8 of some current competitors. With 200’ foot ropes and pitches increasingly the norm, larger racks are often a modern requirement. It’s something we used to dream about 10 years ago – wouldn’t it be great if… well, it is great.

Angus and I climbed quite a bit with them during our dry late fall; Yosemite, some first ascents up Sonora Pass way, volcanic column cracks, etc. Ultralights place with the same solid feel as their predecessors. They give you the confidence to swim for the next placement. Angus summed it up as we compared notes for that weekend’s trip up Arrowhead Arête:

“Dingus? I got the rope and the rack. You bring those Ultralights Bro!”

My love affair is still going strong after 20 years, for my partner, and for my pro. Metolius Ultralights are SWEET. [/size]

[size=12][b]Full Disclosure: The company that manufactured this equipment provided it free of charge to RC.com and RC.com then provided it as compensation to the reviewer for his or her review. This company does not currently advertise on RC.com.[/b]

Did you ever have a love affair with a piece of hardware? Wait a minute, you’re reading a gear review. Of COURSE you’ve had a love affair with a piece of hardware! What was I thinking? We always remember that first affair too, don’t we?

I acquired my first Metolius TCUs almost 20 years ago. Up to that time rigid stem Friends were pretty much the only game in town. The TCU was aimed squarely at the niche where Friends fared poorly, small cracks and horizontals. As soon as I saw them, I had to have them.

OMG, what a huge difference they made! Strong, compact, versatile, the 4 smallest units found a home on my rack immediately. And they stayed there. Other small pro came and went, but when headed up thin cracks I wanted those Metolius TCUs. I’d sneak em onto my bud’s rack when he wasn’t looking. He was a Wired Bliss man and sorta fickle about it, so I had to be sneaky.

You have to go back to the early 80’s; Smith Rock, Oregon country, prior to the sport climbing revolution, which was just getting started. Coursing full grown from an artesian spring, the Metolius River taps the deep aquifers of the Cascade Range and flows past the tiny village of Camp Sherman. That’s where Doug Phillips lived.

Doug invented Sliders and started Metolius working out of his two-bay garage. He hired and taught Steve Byrne to work with silver soldering. Friends hit the market big time right about then and everyone was looking for cams that would fill the gap below the #1 Friend.

From their collaboration the TCU was born, a stable 3-cam, U-shaped cable stem unit that would revolutionize small crack climbing protection in the same way the Friend did for larger cracks. I bought my first orange TCU in 85 or 86. That very same orange TCU is still on my back up rack as I type these words.

This year Metolius introduces their new Ultralight series; TCUs, Power and Fat Ultralights. I have been actively field testing them for the past couple of months. If I could summarize my findings with one work, it would have to be SWEET.[/size]

[img]http://photos.rockclimbing.com/photos//673/67388.jpg[/img]

[size=12]Let’s establish this: I’m no engineer, nor do I evaluate climbing gear for a living. See the professionals for such tech data. Me? I’m a climber and a writer, and this review is written with inherent bias. I like these cams a lot, no, I love them and I would like to tell you why.

Feel - when you pick up and hold a TCU or Power Cam, it just seems to fall right into your hand. It is solidly built, with no slop in the design or the manufacture. Pull the trigger; its buttery smooth and offers very tight control over the individual cams. The cam lobes rotate as if they sported di-lithium crystals in the bearings.

Durability – might as well be a trademark of Metolius hardware in general! Face it, their stuff is built to last. Their cams have proven themselves time and again in the field, on the racks, over the years, over and over. The design works, the materials hold up. Trigger wires, the bane of many a contender, just seem to hold up with minimal or no maintenance at all. Aid, free, bounce testing, aggressive cleaning, stuffed into the bottom of a pack; they hold up to the abuse.

Utility – work horse pieces. Many a trad rack is formed on a backbone of TCUs and Power or Fat Cams. They offer superior holding power and excellent expansion ranges. They’re not so long as to dangle at your knees and not so short they are overly difficult to clean. Across the models they work in most kinds of rock.

I love TCUs for pin scars for example, the way the center cam is free to rotate. I can remember individual cam placements where a Metolius is the only piece that will work. They’re like old buddies, when they meet up, placement and cam!

So the Ultralights? All that, and less. They should consider a tag line for the upcoming Metolius Superbowl commercials:

The Ultralights are ultra light. They may be the lightest FULL RACK of cams on the market. Piece for piece, they are as strong as any competitor and as light, or lighter. When you pick one up, it feels like your hand actually gets LIGHTER. I know, I’m getting carried away, but go pick one up, you’ll see.

Some modern cams surrender weight by shortening the length of the cam. Metolius tried this in some prototypes, but field tests confirmed suspicions. Really short cams are hard to place and even harder to clean, especially in the small sizes. The Ultralights are the same length as their predecessors.

Metolius reengineered the axle design, incorporating what they call DAT, Direct Axle Technology. Gone are the heavier (and wider) axle end-caps of the older design. Instead, the cable stem is attached directly through holes in the axle. Especially in the small sizes, the end caps of the old design could get in the way, cause the piece to bottom out in shallow placements, inhibit rotation or even help the cams to walk, or not engage at all.[/size]

[img]http://photos.rockclimbing.com/photos//673/67389.jpg[/img]

[i]DAT in all its glorious, vivid detail. [/i]

[size=12]DAT eliminates that bulk. You can see the cams better, and there is less restriction in tight placements. Other features include the Range Finder color-coded dots. At first annoying to this old schooler as a marketing ploy, I think they’re a really cool reminder of the optimal placement range. I can use all the reminders I can lay my mind on these days.

So how does all this translate to the rock? Well, I have the lightest full-service rack I have ever carried in my career. I can deploy about 12 cams, with individual biners, for about the same weight as 8 in the past, or even 8 of some current competitors. With 200’ foot ropes and pitches increasingly the norm, larger racks are often a modern requirement. It’s something we used to dream about 10 years ago – wouldn’t it be great if… well, it is great.

Angus and I climbed quite a bit with them during our dry late fall; Yosemite, some first ascents up Sonora Pass way, volcanic column cracks, etc. Ultralights place with the same solid feel as their predecessors. They give you the confidence to swim for the next placement. Angus summed it up as we compared notes for that weekend’s trip up Arrowhead Arête:

“Dingus? I got the rope and the rack. You bring those Ultralights Bro!”

My love affair is still going strong after 20 years, for my partner, and for my pro. Metolius Ultralights are SWEET. [/size]

[b]Full Disclosure: The company that manufactured this equipment provided it free of charge to RC.com and RC.com then provided it as compensation to the reviewer for his or her review. This company does not currently advertise on RC.com.[/b]

For the complete and unabridged version of this review, check out [url=http://www.rockclimbing.com/articles/index.php?id=2077][b]All My Rowdy Friends[/b][/url].

“Dingus, when are you going to buy some new pro?” Brutus of Wyde asked one fine spring day as we were gearing up for a route. He was looking at some of my old Friends and shaking his head in his cheerful way.

I objected, indignant, “There’s nothing wrong with my Friends is there?” I looked anxiously at my pile of cams. I’d gone to the recent trouble of having them re-slung by Yates and felt they were good to go for another few years. He quickly reassured me they were sound, though I detected some doubt in his tone as he examined the old nuts on the ends of the axles.

Years prior, I began acquiring first generation Friends as soon as I became aware of them. Some of the units Brutus frowned upon were among those original purchases, in excess of 20 years old and still in regular use! Friends went on to become the de facto standard in the climbing world. Many climbing areas to this day still define the rack requirements based upon Friend sizing numbers.

What properties should a climber desire in a good SLCD anyway? I can only speak for myself: light weight and strong, versatile and durable, serviceable and easy to use. Friends were ALL these things, in spades. The fact I was still using some of mine after two decades of weekend war is a testament to the design, in and of itself.

But they had their deficiencies too, the rigid stem first and foremost. That rigid stem presented problems in horizontal placements as well as with fall vectors; the stem could snap, bend or break. In the smallest of sizes, Friends were easy to get stuck. The things ‘walked’ into cracks and could be difficult or nearly impossible to get back out. The free market being what it is, the many different commercial cam designs that have sprung up since were intended to address these Friend deficiencies while skirting patents.

[img]http://photos.rockclimbing.com/photos//523/52344.jpg[/img]
[size=9]An early-generation Friend below and the newest Forged Friend above. Can you pick out all the similarities?[/size]

But, Friends are still with us today. The latest versions of Friends, called Forged Friends, are beauties. They have incorporated excellent ideas from many modern cams, both from the Wild Country stable and beyond. The stems are forged, as the name implies, lending them a strength the original design lacked. The old rigid stem was perhaps the cam’s greatest weakness and the forging process creates a unit much less likely to break over an edge (it does not eliminate that prospect, though). The cam lobes are now color anodized by size, easing the selection process when stress is highest. Wild Country also engineered cam stops to prevent the dreaded inverted umbrella. This was another weakness of old cam designs; when placed near the extreme outer limit of their expansion range, the cams could invert and give way.

The color-coded trigger is durable and the design well tested. I haven’t had the need to replace a Friend trigger in over a decade, literally. The originals used thin, easily frayed and broken wires but this problem was solved long ago.
The units also come with color-coded sewn spectra slings, matching the cam and trigger colors, very stylish. And as a bonus this latest unit I have came with a Wild Country Oxygen biner, free! (A $7.95 value according to the label). It’s great idea to package a biner with Friend and these are good ones.

So how do they work? LOL, like Friends of course! They feel good in the hand, the cam resistance is perfect and they are a joy to place. They still offer among the best, if not THE best strength/weight/size ratio on the market. And they are DURABLE. I have every expectation to be using this very same cam for a very long time to come.

A rack of Friends, like pretty much any other cam design if you think about it, needs augmentation to be sure. Small crack pro, wide crack pro (if that’s your bag), and flexible stem designs are an additional requirement on most climbers’ racks. And yet, I am confident as ever that Forged Friends remain relevant and a worthy choice for backbone or “2nd set” duties as ever. They are among the least expensive for all their stellar qualities.

And while my protection needs constantly evolve and the daily requirements are dictated by rock and route, Forged Friends will continue to play a critical role in my climbing. See, rigid stems have their place. For wall climbing, fixing ropes, straight up parallel-sided cracks and a host of other applications, Forged Friends are just the ticket. They are great backcountry cams, too, and work well in the alpine world of ice, mud, rock, hammer and pull, grovel and stand.

No, I don’t really want to place them where the stem can get bent over an edge; despite the strength improvements it is not good policy to do that. And yet, the old school “Gunks Tie-Off” still keeps them in play for even shallow horizontals. In fact, more than a few Gunks climbers assert that with the tie-off, Forged Friends are actually superior to their flexible cam brethren.

Wild Country Friends were the first commercial SLCD on the market. Their introduction revolutionized clean climbing protection. The design was so well thought out and so applicable to climbing needs, that with modest improvements overall, the same design is available and in use today. I can without hesitation make a strong BUY recommendation for Forged Friends. May they last another 20 years!