Cleaning your climbing cams so you don’t die
by Richard on 21/01/2012It’s weird isn’t it? You buy a few nice new shiny cams (or tech friends etc) and you can’t wait until you get out on some nice rock to use them and get rid of that never been used look! After a few trips your cams are looking a bit more used and hence you have entered the sweet spot. The sweet spot consists of when your cams are nearly new but don’t look it thus giving you the assurance of climbing with rock solid cams (providing you place them correctly) but not having that new noob look about them.
So you continue to climb with your cams and because you aren’t just a fair weather climber some of these trips are climbing in… absolute sh**t storms! You return from your most recent trip and notice that the action on a cam or two isn’t exactly what you’d call smooth and then you notice one where the units aren’t even snapping back after you pull them.
Now is the time to clean your cams!
This is the scenario I found myself in recently. At the beginning of 2012 I had a check over all my climbing gear and noticed that a few of my older DMM 4CUs weren’t operating as smoothly as I would like and one was even sticking. If a cam is sticking like this do not use it to climb with. I hope it’s obvious why.
I thought I’d put up a quick blog post detailing what I did to get all my cams running smoothly (mostly) once again.
The problem
Here’s a video of a stuck cam before I fixed it. It demonstrates one of the issues where cam lube can help. You certainly wouldn’t want this happening while your hanging from a few finger pumping out on real rock.


