Front View	Rear View	Side View

Technical Details

I made this copy of Gerald Wood’s whaletail in 2008.

This copy is milled from 6061-T6 aluminum. It is 252 mm. tall, 60 mm. wide, 20 mm. thick, and weighs 624 g.

Comments

Gerald Wood (inventor of the 8-link knot) invented the whaletail and published the design in the December 1967 NSS News, but quickly denied responsibility for naming the device. He was aware of John Cole’s rappel rack, but he had concerns over heat dissipation (strangely, he preferred Patten’s J-bar to the rack). The Whaletail addresses the heat issue very well, at the expense of being somewhat heavy. I made this whaletail using the published dimensions, but relied on my milling machine rather than hand tools for the fabrication.

Gerald and his friends were concerned about whether the rope could come out of the whaletail, but after extensive testing, concluded that the rope could only come out if they shortened the guards. Alas, they were wrong. A friend of mine had the rope come out of a whaletail as he started down the 155 m. Fantastic Pit in Ellisons Cave, putting him into freefall. The incident ended happily as he attached an ascender to the rope on the way down, but this incident combined with continued concerns over the whaletail’s safety led to its demise in the USA. The Austrailians adopted the whaletail for a while, after sensibly adding a safety gate.