Front	Side	Rear

Technical Details

I made my Storrick – Abakalov Décrocheur 2021.

My Décrocheur is 29 mm. long, 89 mm. wide, 10 mm. high, and weighs 68 g. The large eye is is 14 mm. in diameter. The accessory cord holes are 4 mm.

I made this Décrocheur from mild steel plate, following the plans given on page 204 of Само-дельное Туристское Снаряжениеб Москва Физкультура и Спорт (1986).

Comments

The text in Само-дельное Туристское Снаряжениеб Москва Физкультура и Спорт pages 197-204 explaining the Abakalov Décrocheur can be translated as follows:

To pull off the main rope after the last participant has descended in tourist groups, it is good to have a special device - an ejector. The most reliable, in our opinion, is the design of the lever ejector proposed by V. M. Abalakov.

It consists of a lever hook (1) and two cord loops (2) and (3). The loop (2) 250 mm. long is inserted into the safety loop, left at the top, and is thrown onto the hook, and a drop rope is attached to the loop (3), which is usually used as an auxiliary rope. The main rope is secured in the eye of the lever hook. When the main rope is loaded with the weight of the descending person, the ejector acts as a hook hung on the safety loop. False actuation of the ejector due to accidental loading of the dumping rope during descent is prevented by a loop (2), which prevents the hook-lever from falling out of the safety loop when twisting the main rope. After the descent, when the rope is unloaded, the entire system is pulled off by a jerk on the drop rope.

Décrocheurs can be scary, and their use should be left to experts who have the knowledge and expertise to understand, appreciate, and mitigate the obvious hazard of tempting the law of gravitation.

The Abakalov Décrocheur is smaller and lighter than the Pierre Allain Décrocheur, but it relies on one hanging by a few strands of 4 mm. cord. New 4 mm. accessory cord should hold 3.2 kN, so four strands should hold twice that, allowing a 50% loss for the sharp bends. This should suffice for reasonable-weight people, but there is not a lot of margin and this will only get worse as the cord ages and wears. I prefer the metal hook on the Pierre Allain.

Само-дельное shows a method for using the Abakalov Décrocheur and a dummy unthreaded ice screw to retreat from an ice climb without leaving any gear. I have not tried this idea, nor do I intend to - I just don't trust the idea. I'll stick to the spin-out ice-screw recovery technique that I've used in the past - a technique that does not require any special gear.