Traditional		Customized
Double Brake Bars

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Traditional

This is a traditional double brake bar rig. Each aluminum carabiner has a solid aluminum brake bar mounted on the gate. The two carabiners are linked with a chain link.

There are several points to notice:

• Bad point: The brake bars pivot on the gate. If the end of the brake bar is bumped, the gate will open. If this happens, the tension in the rope is usually sufficient to rip the gate out of the carabiner. For this reason, one should always rappel with the carabiners vertical and the gates toward themselves instead of the pit lip.
• The top carabiner is an old one. Note that there is no lip where the gate closes. This allows the brake bar to slide up, which helps lock the gate closed. The lower carabiner is little bit newer. In this one, the brake bar cannot slide up, so the gate will not be locked by the brake bar. Most carabiners made in the past 25 years are even worse (for example, see the one I used to demonstrate the Carabiner Wrap ).
• The rope should be rigged so that it passes on the carabiner spine side of the chain link. This puts less sideways stress on the gate than the opposite arrangement.

Some people prefer a single brake bar, but I consider this to have too little friction for all but the lightest rappeller’s, and there is no redundancy. Others prefer a triple brake bar rig, but this gives me too much friction to be able to descend without feeding the rope. For most people, two seems to work best.

I quit using the traditional brake bar rigs long ago after one 42-foot rappel in a muddy West Virginia cave wore deep enough grooves in a pair of new carabiners that I retired them after that rappel. Other methods cost less.

Warning: When starting the rappel, make sure that the carabiner-chain link-carabiner arrangement is fully extended. The rig can easily invert to an arrangement reminiscent of the French Crossed Carabiner setup. When this happens, the friction is greatly reduced. Correcting the problem with weight on the rig is nearly impossible, so the rappeller either has to live with it, find a place to stand, or play games with ascenders. It is easier to simply pay attention to detail from the start.

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Customized

This is the double brake bar rig that I came up with and used for a number of years. It has several advantages and disadvantages compared to the traditional rig:

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