Yes they are legit and yes their cams have been tested. They hold up to their ratings (in the tests I have seen). But one only knows how well their quality control is. Don’t go cheep, get some Camalots.

Anyway a UIAA cert doesn’t mean shit with trad gear as far as strength goes. A cam only needs to hold 5 kN to get the UIAA stamp and some trad gear that only holds 2 kN can still get the UIAA stamp if they list the gear as progression or aid equipment.

Tested sure but what about quality control. You’re braver then me if you if you use them.

BZZZTTT!!!! Incorrect, thanks for playing.

Off the top of my head, current generation OP Link Cams, CCH Aliens and all single stem Rock Empire use nuts as their axle terminations. Well, almost... the RE use large head hex cap screws, but same idea.

And FWIW, there's a old review/test of a gear4rocks cam here. Looks like the ones they're making currently are nicer and when you get down to it building a cam isn't rocket science. All you need is the proper curve on the lobes and the ability to swage the fittings, neither of which is hard to do.

We test this size of cam five times and got the maxium load rate shown in the table below.

Hey Aric, I'm not trying to be a dick, and I'm not trying to get massive thread-drift here, but given your history on this site with both potentially-read-as-implicit-attacks against CCH QC as well as some explicit warnings about Aliens, I would think long and hard before coming back by saying something like that about a gear company.

Why the lax attitude with gear4rocks and not Aliens? Surely there aren't nearly enough people using gear4rocks cams out there for quality concerns to start popping up, are there? I would wager one of the reasons that as many Alien issues popped up as they did is that so many people used these cams so often. gear4rock cams are a different story. Maybe they are fine, but they haven't really been used enough to be "field tested" and they certainly don't (as far as I can tell) have any sort of reliable certification for their QC process.

Just doesn't seem fair or logically sound to have these two contradictory positions. In fact it seems to further people's claims that you are biased. Now, I don't think that is true. BUT this sort of flippant stance against a company with far less of a history than CCH seems a bit biased, eh?

... I haven't climbed every where and there are certainly more knowledgable/experience than I, but I have climbed in Europe and South Africa. Nobody I've climbed with here or abroad had any of those cams on their rack.

From that eBay page:


This line doesn't exactly make me want to go out and take some whippers on their gear.

I just got that measurement the other day, so I'm looking at losing 3 months of my life again in the very near future.

EDIT- Oh, and JEALOUS about climbing in SA. Was there, saw lots of good climbing, but didn't since I hadn't gotten into it yet.

They're much more expensive now (in a relative sense), but back when they were $15/cam it was another question. Nowadays when another $5 gets you into something more well known here in the US, perhaps it isn't as attractive an option.

Not so much a break as getting caught up with my real work... Unfortunately that lead to missing out on most of the climbing season, but that's the way it is.

Oh, and I'll pass on the dogbone. I've got so much stuff here to break I'm losing track of what came from where and have little hope of getting to any of it any time soon.