Front View	Rear View	Side View

Front View: Open for Rigging	Rear View: Open for Rigging

Technical Details

I acquired this bobbin from Vladimir Kisseljov and Ilia Alexandrov at the 1994 Old Timer’s Reunion.

Version B is 222 mm. tall, 55 mm. wide, 32 mm. thick, and weighs 246 g.

The side plates and handle are stamped from 3 mm. aluminum. The pivoting side plate has a spring wire gate that allows one to rig the bobbin without unclipping from the seat harness.

The upper main bollard is very similar to Petzl’s. The upper bollard is cut away on its lower side to provide a flat surface to act as an anvil for the cam action of the autostop feature. A rounded 8 mm. steel cylinder is pressed into a hole in the lower surface of this bollard, and acts as a wear resisting bar.

The lower bollard is part of an autostop device. A handle is attached to the bollard with two 4 mm. screws. The fixed side plate prevents these screws from backing out. The handle portion is bent into a U to increase thickness, then covered with a plastic grip for comfort. A 13.5 mm. diameter cylinder is attached at the 10 o’clock position with a 4 mm. screw through the handle plate (much like that on the Diablo). The lower bollard and attached handle assembly pivot on the lower 7 mm. bolt. Friction from the main rope’s passage tends to turn the lower bollard and force the cylinder towards the upper bollard, thus locking the rope and ideally arresting the descent. The rappeller uses the handle to keep the autostop feature disengaged.

This bobbin features the auxiliary bollard seen on the later Petzl Bobbins and Petzl Stop Bobbins.

This bobbin has a sticker on the rear with a logo, "Иепытано" (meaning "Tested") and "Tested." The logo is stamped at the top of the pivoting side plate.

Comments

The spring wire gate latch is an improvement over the gates on most bobbins. It works quite well, I would like to see more of these.

The auxiliary bollard works very well for keeping the rope on the upper main bollard without binding, but is less satisfactory when used as part of the braking system. The rod is too small to function well as a third braking surface, has no means to insure that the rope stays on the rod reliably, and is located where it forces the rope into an inconvenient position. This last point is particularly noticeable if the trailing rope passes through a maillon clipped to the seat maillon as indicated in the Petzl instructions and required for safety. In this case it requires too many contortions to switch from the two bollard mode to the three bollard mode.

I have a similar Russian bobbin with the same logo (a stylized script Д). I asked Артём Бабин if he knew who the manufacturer was, and on January 11, 2021, I received the following reply:

Hello, Gary! I found out whose logo it was. I was prompted by Andrey Ponkratov, director of the company Orion-Alp, in general, this equipment was produced in the mid-90s by Mikhail Dyakin, a speleologist from Moscow, a programmer by profession. He released only 3 things, 2 of them you have and still produced a copy of Petzl Shunt.

Артём met Михаил Дякин in September 2021, and provided this additional information:

Hello, Gary! Today I met Mikhail Dyakin, he is alive and well, now retired and lives outside the city [Moscow], we agreed to meet in October, there will be an interview, I will ask him about his equipment….

Dyakin’s firm was called Cascade (Каскад).