BLACK DIAMOND GRIDLOCK SCREWGATE

How many times have you looked down while belaying and noticed your locking biner has slipped sideways, so that either the belay loop or the belay device is smack up against the carabiner gate? Once a day? Every two minutes? This is cross-loading, and it’s dangerous—a locking carabiner is only about one-third as strong across its width as along its full length. Various solutions to this problem have been proposed, but most have been too heavy or futzy to catch on. Enter the Gridlock Screwgate, a cross-loading solution so simple and elegant that BD deserves to sell a million of them. The Gridlock’s gate has a short prong that extends into the narrow end of the biner. Open the gate, and the prong rotates out of the way so you can slip the biner over your belay loop; close the gate again, and the prong seals the gap, effectively locking the biner into the correct position for belaying. Once you get the feel of it, placing and removing this biner is as simple as it is with any locker. And by hot-forging these biners, Black Diamond was able to shave metal from the I-beam spine—the biner is a reasonably svelte 2.7 oz.—while leaving smooth, rounded surfaces at the rope-bearing ends. At Climbing’s office, our test sample kept mysteriously disappearing as editors insisted it needed just one more day of testing. You’ll want to label your Gridlock.