Front: Closed for Use	Front: Open for Rigging

Top: Closed for Use	Top: Open for Rigging

Technical Details

I acquired this Barhar box from Barhar Rescue in 2024.

My Barhar is 78 mm. wide, 175 mm. high, 55 mm. thick, and weighs 607 g., including the supplied harness.

It is a single channel chest box consisting of a milled plate, a single Al roller, a side entry pin-activated gate, and a sewn harness. The back plate has 45 mm. tall vertical slots for attaching the box to the chest strap and 39 mm. wide horizontal slots for attaching the shoulder straps. Four 10 mm. holes can be used to attach a bungee pulley.

The roller is 34 mm. in diameter and 25 mm. wide. It has a 4.5 mm. deep, 21 mm. wide U-shaped circumferential groove that gives the roller a 25 mm. minor diameter. The roller axle is 8 mm. in diameter. It is bolted to a milled block. The block is attached to the back plate with three hex-socket countersink-head machine screws. The gate, to the user's right of the pulley, pivots on the roller axle. A spring-loaded pull pin the support block provides a gate latch. It must be pulled forward to open the gate, but the design allows closing the gate without pulling the pin.

The box comes attached to a sewn chest harness.

The plate is printed with "BARHAR," "HL9257," some Chinese text, and a circle-and-slashed human icon.

Comments

I first saw this in a FaceBook post. Several people who did not appear to have tried this assumed that it was unsafe because it is Chinese. Chest boxes are not life-support equipment and their failure, when properly used, is little more than a nuisance. Lacking Sinophobic mental illness myself, I have no reason to believe that using my Barhar plate is any more unsafe than using any other.

That said, I find this box to be somewhat massive for my taste. I prefer to make my own harnesses, but the harness that came with my Barhar works reasonably well. It lacks the excessive bulk of the harnesses that came with my I Climb #965 or PMI Double, Version B.

The pull-pin safety latch is rather strong and is somewhat awkward to operate, especially if wearing gloves. The knob attached to the outside of the safety appears to be there to allow a pinch grip, but I find that it just gets in the way.

The roller turns smoothly, but unless you are climbing battleship mooring hawsers, is probably larger than it needs to be.